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THE 



YOUNG PEOPLE'S TENNYSON 



THE STUDENTS' SERIES 

t 

OF 

Edited by W. J. ROLFE, A M. 

I. SCOTT'S LADY OF THE LAKE. 

The text is correctly printed for the first time in fifty years. The notes 
(eighty-eight pages) include Scott's and Lockhart's, and are fuller than in 
any other edition, English or American. The illustrations are mainly of 
the scenery of the poem. 

n. TENNYSON'S THE PRINCESS. 

The text is more accurately printed than in any other edition. The 
notes (fifty pages) give the history of the poem, all the readings of the 
earlier editions, selected comments by the best English and American 
critics, full explanation of all the allusions, &c. The illustrations are from 
Ticknor's holiday edition. 

in. SELECT POEMS OF TENNYSON. 

The Poet, Lady of Shalott, CEnone, The Lotus-Eaters, The Palace of 
Art, A Dream of Fair Women, Morte d'Arthur, Ulysses, Eocksley Hall, 
Sir Galahad, &c. The text is from the latest English edition (1884). The 
tiotcs (fifty pages) include a careful collation of the early editions, with ex- 
planatory and critical comments, original and selected. The illustra- 
tions are of high character. 

IV. SCOTT'S MARMION. 

With copious and carefully prepared notes and fine illustrations. 

V. BYRON'S CHILDE HAROLD. 

With thorough and comprehensive notes and connnentaries, greatly 
aiding in the comprehension of this great poem. 

VI. YOUNG PEOPLE'S TENNYSON. 

A selection of the poems most liked by, and adapted to, young persons, 
with notes and commentaries. 

1^- All these books are equally suited to the use of the student in 
school or college, and that of the general reader. They should have a 
place in every library. 75 cents each. 

Sent^ post-paid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers., 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY, Boston. 




Toll ye the church-bell sad and slow, 
And tread softly and speak low, 
For the old year lies a-dying." 



THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S 



(MXrXc^ V* vir\ 



T 



E N N Y S O N 



Edited with Notes 



BY 



WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A.M. 

FORMERLY HEAD MASTER OF THE HIGH SCHOOL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 








BOSTON 
TICKNOR AND COMPANY 

1886 






Copyright, 1886, 
By Ticknor and Company. 



All rights reserved. 



University Press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



PREFACE. 



In the preface to the Select Poems of Tennyson, published two years 
ago, I explained that certain favorite pieces, the omission of which 
might be wondered at, were reserved for another volume intended for 
a younger class of readers than those for whom the first was designed. 
The plan thus hinted at is here carried out. 

The text of the poems is that of the last (1884) English edition, the 
earlier readings, so far as I could ascertain them, being given in the 
Notes. The other annotations are chiefly devoted to historical matter 
and to rhetorical comment on words and phrases that seemed to require 
or invite it. I have, as a rule, purposely refrained from *' aesthetic " 
criticism. This the young reader or student should be led to " evolve 
from his own consciousness." The real meaning and lesson of the 
poem, the secret of its music and beauty, and of its power to move 
or inspire us, he should discern and point out for himself. 

It may be said that this is expecting too much of beginners in the 
study of poetry ; but I believe it should be one of the first exercises we 
require of them. If the teacher or parent has not the skill and tact to 
train them to it, I cannot add notes to help him which will not be likely 
at the same time to harm the young people. 

While the book is primarily intended to aid teachers and parents in 
awakening and cultivating a taste for poetry in the young, I hope that 
a considerable portion of the matter in the Notes may be of some 
interest and service to older readers and students. 

Cambridge, May 15, 1886. 



CONTENTS. 



« — 

Page 

The Death of the Old Year ii 

The Blackbird 13 

The Merman 14 

The Mermaid 15 

The May Queen 17 

The Deserted House 24 

Dora 26 

GoDiVA 31 

The Day-Dream 34 

Lady Clare 43 

The Captain 46 

The Beggar Maid 49 

The Voyage 51 

The Charge of the Light Brigade 54 

The Sailor Boy 57 

The Victim 58 

The Revenge 61 

The Defence of Lucknow 66 

The Voyage of Maeldune 71 

The Poet's Song 78 

In the Children's Hospital 79 

Love and Death 84 

Notes Ss 




THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR. 



Full knee-deep lies the winter's snow, 
And the winter winds are wearily sighing : 
Toll ye the church-bell sad and slow, 
And tread softly and speak low. 
For the old year lies a-dying. 
Old year, you must not die ; 
You came to us so readily, 
You lived with us so steadily. 
Old year, you shall not die. 

He lieth still : he doth not move : 

He will not see the dawn of day. 

He hath no other life above. 

He gave me a friend, and a true true-love, 

And the New-year will take 'em away. 

Old year, you must not go ; 

So long as you have been with us, 

-Such joy as you have seen with us, 

Old year, you shall not go. 

He froth'd his bumpers to the brim ; 
A jollier year we shall not see. 
But the' his eyes are waxing dim, 



12 THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR. 

And tho' his foes speak ill of him, 
He was a friend to me. 

Old year, you shall not die ; 

We did so laugh and cry with you, 

I 've half a mind to die with you, 

Old year, if you must die. 

He was full of joke and jest, 
But all his merry quips are o'er. 
To see him die, across the waste 
His son and heir doth ride post-haste, 
But he '11 be dead before. 

Every one for his own. 

The night is starry and cold, my friend, 

And the New-year blithe and bold, my friend, 

Comes up to take his own. 

How hard he breathes ! over the snow 
I heard just now the crowing cock. 
The shadows flicker to and fro : 
The cricket chirps : the light burns low : 
'T is nearly twelve o'clock. 

Shake hands, before you die. 

Old year, we '11 dearly rue for you : 

What is it we can do for you ? 

Speak out before you die. 

His face is growing sharp and thin. 
Alack ! our friend is gone. 
Close up his eyes : tie up his chin : 
Step from the corpse, and let him in 
That standeth there alone, 

And waiteth at the door. 

There 's a new foot on the floor, my friend, 

And a new face at the door, my friend, 

A new face at the door, 



THE BLACKBIRD. 13 



THE BLACKBIRD. 

O BLACKBIRD ! siiig me something well : 
While all the neighbors shoot thee round, 
I keep smooth plats of fruitful ground, 

Where thou mayst warble, eat, and dwell. 

The espaliers and the standards all 

Are thine ; the range of lawn and park : 
The unnetted black-hearts ripen dark, 

All thine, against the garden wall. 

Yet, tho' I spared thee all the spring, 
Thy sole delight is, sitting still. 
With that gold dagger of thy bill 

To fret the summer jenneting. 

A golden bill ! the silver tongue, 

Cold February loved, is dry ; 

Plenty corrupts the melody 
That made thee famous once, when young : 

And in the sultry garden-squares, 

Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse, 
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse 

As when a hawker hawks his wares. 

Take warning ! he that will not sing 
While yon sun prospers in the blue, 
Shall sing for want, ere leaves are new. 

Caught in the frozen palms of Spring. 



14 THE MERMAN. 






THE MERMAN. 

I. 
Who would be 
A merman bold, 
Sitting alone, 
Singing alone 
Under the sea, 
With a crown of gold. 
On a throne ? 

II. 

I would be a merman bold, 
I would sit and sing the whole of the day ; 
I would fill the sea-halls with a voice of power ; 
But at night I would roam abroad and play 
With the mermaids in and out of the rocks, 
Dressing their hair with the white sea-flower ; 
And holding them back by their flowing locks 
I would kiss them often under the sea. 
And kiss them again tiU they kiss'd me 

Laughingly, laughingly ; 
And then we would wander away, away 
To the pale-green sea-groves straight and high, 

Chasing each other merrily. 



THE MERMAID. 

III. 
There would be neither moon nor star ; 
But the wave would make music above us afar — 
Low thunder and light in the magic night — 

Neither moon nor star. 
We would call aloud in the dreamy dells, 
Call to each other and whoop and cry 

All night, merrily, merrily ; 
They would pelt me with starry spangles and shells. 
Laughing and clapping their hands between, 

All night, merrily, merrily : 
But I would throw to them back in mine 
Turkis and agate and almondine : 
Then leaping out upon them unseen 
I would kiss them often under the sea, 
And kiss them again till they kiss'd me 

Laughingly, laughingly. 
Oh ! what a happy life were mine 
Under the hollow-hung ocean green ! 
Soft are the moss-beds under the sea ; 
We would live merrily, merrily. 



THE MERMAID. 



Who would be 
A mermaid fair, 
Singing alone. 
Combing her hair 
Under the sea, 
In a golden curl 
With a comb of pearl, 
On a throne ? 



15 



40 



1 6 THE MERMAID. 

II. 
I would be a mermaid fair ; 
I would sing to myself the whole of the day ; lo 

With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair ; 
And still as I comb'd I would sing and say, 
' Who is it loves me ? who loves not me ? ' 
I would comb my hair till my ringlets would fall 

Low adown, low adown, 
From under my starry sea-bud crown 

Low adown and around, 
And I should look like a fountain of gold 

Springing alone 
With a shrill inner sound, 20 

Over the throne 
In the midst of the hall ; 
Till that great sea-snake under the sea 
From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps 
Would slowly trail himself sevenfold 
Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate 
With his large calm eyes for the love of me. 
And all the mermen under the sea 
Would' feel their immortality 
Die in their hearts for the love of me. 3° 

III. 
But at night I would wander away, away, 

I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks, 
And lightly vault from the throne and play 

With the mermen in and out of the rocks ; 
We would run to and fro, and hide and seek, 

On the broad sea-wolds in the crimson shells. 

Whose silvery spikes are nighest the sea. 
But if any came near I would call, and shriek. 
And adown the steep like a wave I would leap 

From the diamond-ledges that jut from the dells ; 40 



THE MA Y Q UEEN. 1 7 

For I would not be kiss'd by all who would list, 

Of the bold merry mermen under the sea ; 

They would sue me, and woo me, and flatter me, 

In the purple twilights under the sea ; 

But the king of them all would carry me. 

Woo me, and win me, and marry me, 

In the branching jaspers under the sea ; 

Then all the dry pied things that be 

In the hueless mosses under the sea 

Would curl round my silver feet silently, so 

All looking up for the love of me. 

And if I should carol aloud, from aloft 

All things that are forked, and horned, and soft 

Would lean out from the hollow sphere of the sea, 

All looking down for the love of me. 



THE MAY QUEEN. 

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear ; 
To-morrow 'ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year ; 
Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day ; 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

There 's many a black black eye, they say, but none so bright 

as mine ; 
There 's Margaret and Mary, there 's Kate and Caroline : 
But none so fair as little Alice in all Ihe land they say, 
So I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen o' 

the May. 

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake. 
If you do not call me loud when the day begins to break : lo 



1 8 THE MAY QUEEN. 

But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay, 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

As I came up the valley whom think ye should I see. 
But Robin leaning on the bridge beneath the hazel-tree ? 
He thought of that sharp look, mother, I gave him yesterday, 
But I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

He thought I was a ghost, mother, for I was all in white. 
And I ran by him without speaking, like a flash of light. 
They call me cruel-hearted, but I care not what they say. 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 20 

They say he 's dying all for love, but that can never be : 
They say his heart is breaking, mother — what is that to me ? 
There 's many a bolder lad 'ill woo me any summer day. 
And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

Little Eflie shall go with me to-morrow to the green. 
And you '11 be there, too, mother, to see me made the Queen ; 
For the shepherd lads on every side 'ill come from far away, 
And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 

The honeysuckle round the porch has woven its wavy bowers. 

And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo- 
flowers ; 30 

And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and 
hollows gray. 

And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 



THE MAY QUEEN. ^9 

The night-winds come and go, mother, upon the meadow- 
grass, 
And the happy stars above them seem to brighten as they 

pass ; 
There will not be a drop of rain the whole of the livelong day, 
And I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 

o' the May. 

All the valley, mother, 'ill be fresh and green and still. 
And the cowslip and the crowfoot are over all the hill, 
And the rivulet in the flowery dale 'ill merrily glance and play, 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 
o' the May. 4o 

So you must wake and call me early, call me early, mother 

dear. 
To-morrow 'ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year : 
To-morrow 'ill be of all the year the maddest merriest day. 
For I 'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I 'm to be Queen 

o' the May. 



NEW-YEAR'S EVE. 

If you 're waking call me early, call me early, mother dear, 
For I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year. 
It is the last New-year that I shall ever see, 
Then you may lay me low i' the mould and think no more 
of me. 

To-night I saw the sun set : he set and left behind 

The good old year, the dear old time, and all my peace of 

mind ; 
And the New-year's coming up, mother, but I shall never see 
The blossom on the blackthorn, the leaf upon the tree. 



20 THE MAY QUEEN. 

Last May we made a crown of flowers : we had a merry day ; 

Beneath the hawthorn on the green they made me Queen of 
May ; 

And we danced about the may-pole and in the hazel copse, 

Till Charles's Wain came out above the tall white chimney- 
tops. 

There 's not a flower on all the hills : the frost is on the pane : 
I only wish to live till the snowdrops come again : 
I wish the snow would melt and the sun come out on high : 
I long to see a flower so before the day I die. 60 

The building rook 'ill caw from the windy tall elm-tree, 

And the tufted plover pipe along the fallow lea, 

And the swallow 'ill come back again with summer o'er the 

wave, 
But I shall lie alone, mother, within the mouldering grave. 

Upon the chancel-casement, and upon that grave of mine, 
In the early early morning the summer sun 'ill shine. 
Before the red cock crows from the farm upon the hill, 
When you are warm-asleep, mother, and all the world is still. 

When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning 

light 
You '11 never see me more in the long gray fields at night ; 70 
When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool 
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the 

pool. 

You '11 bury me, my mother, just beneath the hawthorn shade. 
And you '11 come sometimes and see me where I am lowly laid. 
I shall not forget you, mother, I shall hear you when you pass, 
With your feet above my head in the long and pleasant grass. 



THE MAY QUEEN. 2i 

I have been wild and wayward, but you '11 forgive me now ; 
You '11 kiss me, my own mother, and forgive me ere I go ; 
Nay, nay, you must not weep, nor let your grief be wild, 
You should not fret for me, mother, you have another child. 80 

If I can I '11 come again, mother, from out my resting-place ; 
Tho' you '11 not see me, mother, I shall look upon your face ; 
Tho' I cannot speak a word, I shall hearken what you say, 
And be often, often with you when you think I 'm far away. 

Good-night, good-night, when I have said good-night for ever- 
more. 
And you see me carried out from the threshold of the door ; 
Don't let Effie come to see me till my grave be growing green : 
She '11 be a better child to you than ever I have been. 

She '11 find my garden-tools upon the granary floor : 
Let her take 'em : they are hers : I shall never garden more : 90 
But tell her, when I 'm gone, to train the rose-bush that I set 
About the parlor-window and the box of mignonette. 

Good-night, sweet mother : call me before the day is born. 
All night I lie awake, but I fall asleep at morn ; 
But I would see the sun rise upon the glad New-year, 
So, if you 're waking, call me, call me early, mother dear. 

CONCLUSION. 

I THOUGHT to pass away before, and yet alive I am ; 

And in the fields all round I hear the bleating of the lamb. 

How sadly, I remember, rose the morning of the year ! 

To die before the snowdrop came, and now the violet 's here. 100 

O, sweet is the new violet, that comes beneath the skies. 
And sweeter is the young lamb's voice to me that cannot rise, 
And sweet is all the land about, and all the flowers that blow, 
And sweeter far is death than life to me that long to go. 



22 , THE MAY QUEEN. 

It seem'd so hard at first, mother, to leave the blessed sun, 
And now it seems as hard to stay, and yet His will be done ! 
But still I think it can't be long before I find release ; 
And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace. 

O blessings on his kindly voice and on his silver hair ! 

And blessings on his whole life long, until he meet me there ! no 

blessings on his kindly heart and on his silver head ! 

A thousand times I blest him, as he knelt beside my bed. 

He taught me all the mercy, for he show'd me all the sin. 
Now, tho' my lamp was lighted late, there 's One will let me in : 
Nor would I now be well, mother, again if that could be. 
For my desire is but to pass to Him that died for me. 

1 did not hear the dog howl, mother, or the death-watch beat. 
There came a sweeter token when the night and morning meet : 
But sit beside my bed, mother, and put your hand in mine. 
And Effie on the other side, and I will tell the sign. 120 

All in the wild March-morning I heard the angels call ; 
It was when the moon was setting, and the dark was over all ; 
The trees began to whisper, and the wind began to roll. 
And in the wild March-morning I heard them call my soul. 

For lying broad awake I thought of you and Effie dear ; 
I saw you sitting in the house, and I no longer here ; 
With all my strength I pray'd for both, and so I felt resign'd. 
And up the valley came a swell of music on the wind. 

I thought that it was fancy, and I listen'd in my bed. 
And then did something speak to me — I knov>^ not what was 
said ; 130 

For great delight and shuddering took hold of all my mind, 
And up the valley came again the music on the wind. 



THE MAY QUEEN. 



23 



il^fellhlll lit 111 11^11- iiM .■. fi?lii(lilillimipilllb^ 




THE MAY queen: CONCLUSION. 

But you were sleeping ; and I said, ' It 's not for them : it 's 

mine.' 
And if it come three times, I thought, I take it for a sign. 
And once again it came, and close beside the window-bars, 
Then seem'd to go right up to Heaven and die among the stars. 



So now I think my time is near. I trust it is. I know 
The blessed music went that way my soul will have to go. 
And for myself, indeed, I care not if I go to-day. 
But, Effie, you must comfort her when I am past away. 



24 THE DESERTED HOUSE. 

And say to Robin a kind word, and tell him not to fret ; 
There 's many a worthier than I, would make him happy yet. 
If I had lived — I cannot tell — I might have been his wife ; 
But all these things have ceased to be, with my desire of life. 

O, look ! the sun begins to rise, the heavens are in a glow ; 
He shines upon a hundred fields, and all of them I know. 
And there I move no longer now, and there his light may 

shine — 
Wild flowers in the valley for other hands than mine. 

O, sweet and strange it seems to me, that ere this day is done 
The voice, that now is speaking, may be beyond the sun — 150 
For ever and for ever with those just souls and true — 
And what is life, that we should moan ? why make we such ado ? 

For ever and for ever, all in a blessed home — 
And there to wait a little while till you and Effie come — 
To lie within the light of God, as I lie upon your breast — 
And the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. 



THE DESERTED HOUSE. 



Life and Thought have gone away 

Side by side. 

Leaving door and windows wide 
Careless tenants they ! 

IL 

All within is dark as night : 
In the windows is no light ; 
And no murmur at the door, 
So frequent on its hinge before. 



THE DESERTED HOUSE. 



25 




III. 



Close the door, the shutters close, 

Or thro' the windows we shall see 
The nakedness and vacancy 

Of the dark deserted house. 



IV. 

Come away : no more of mirth 

Is here or merry-making sound. 

The house was builded of the earth, 
And shall fall again to ground. 



26 DORA. 



V. 



Come away : for Life and Thought 

Here no longer dwell ; 
But in a city glorious — 
A great and distant city — have bought 

A mansion incorruptible. 
Would they could have stayed with us ! 



D ORA. 

With farmer Allan at the farm abode 
William and Dora. William was his son, 
And she his niece. He often look'd at them, 
And often thought, ' I '11 make them man and wife.* 
Now Dora felt her uncle's will in all, 
And yearn'd towards William ; but the youth, because 
He had been always with her in the house. 
Thought not of Dora. 

Then there came a day 
When Allan call'd his son, and said : ' My son, 
I married late, but I would wish to see 
My grandchild on my knees before I die : 
And I have set my heart upon a match. 
Now therefore look to Dora ; she is well 
To look to ; thrifty too beyond her age. 
She is my brother's daughter : he and I 
Had once hard words, and parted, and he died 
In foreign lands ; but for his sake I bred 
His daughter Dora : take her for your wife ; 
For I have wish'd this marriage, night and day. 
For many years.' But William answer'd short : 
' I cannot marry Dora ; by my life, 



DORA. 27 

I will not marry Dora.' Then the old man 

Was wroth, and doubled up his hands, and said : 

* You will not, boy ! you dare to answer thus ! 

But in my time a father's word was law, 

And so it shall be now for me. Look to it ; 

Consider, William : take a month to think, 

And let me have an answer to my wish ; 

Or, by the Lord that made me, you shall pack, 

And never more darken my doors again.' 30 

But William answer'd madly j bit his lips. 

And broke away. The more he look'd at her 

The less he liked her ; and his ways were harsh ; 

But Dora bore them meekly. Then before 

The month was out he left his father's house, 

And hired himself to work within the fields ; 

And half in love, half spite, he woo'd and wed 

A laborer's daughter, Mary Morrison. 

Then, when the bells were ringing, Allan call'd 
His niece and said : ' My girl, I love you well ; 40 

But if you speak with him that was my son. 
Or change a word with her he calls his wife, 
My home is none of yours. My will is law.' 
And Dora promised, being meek. She thought, 
' It cannot be : my uncle's mind will change ! ' 

And days went on, and there was born a boy 
To William ; then distresses came on him ; 
And day by day he pass'd his father's gate. 
Heart-broken, and his father help'd him not. 
But Dora stored what litde she could save, 5° 

And sent it them by stealth, nor did they know 
Who sent it ; till at last a fever seized 
On William, and in harvest time he died. 

Then Dora went to Mary. Mary sat 
And look'd with tears upon her boy, and thought 
Hard things of Dora, Dora came and said : 



28 ^ DORA. 

' I have obey'd my uncle until now, 
And I have sinn'd, for it was all thro' me 
This evil came on William at the first. 
But, Mary, for the sake of him that 's gone, 60 

And for your sake, the woman that he chose. 
And for this orphan, I am come to you : 
You know there has not been for these five years 
So full a harvest : let me take the boy, 
And I will set him in my uncle's eye 
Among the wheat ; that when his heart is glad 
Of the full harvest, he may see the boy, 
And bless him for the sake of him that's gone.' 

And Dora took the child, and went her way 
Across the wheat, and sat upon a mound 70 

That was unsown, where many poppies grew. 
Far off the farmer came into the field 
And spied her not ; for none of all his men 
Dare tell him Dora waited with the child ; 
And Dora would have risen and gone to him. 
But her heart fail'd her ; and the reapers reap'd, 
And the sun fell, and all the land was dark. 

But when the morrow came, she rose and took 
The child once more, and sat upon the mound ; 
And made a little wreath of all the flowers 80 

That grew about, and tied it round his hat 
To make him pleasing in her uncle's eye. 
Then when the farmer pass'd into the field 
He spied her, and he left his men at work. 
And came and said : ' Where were you yesterday ? 
Whose child is that? What are you doing here? ' 
So Dora cast her eyes upon the ground. 
And answer'd softly, ' This is William's child ! ' 
' And did I not,' said Allan, ' did I not 
Forbid you, Dora?' Dora said again : 90 

'■ Do with me as you will, but take the child. 



DORA. 29 

And bless him for the sake of him that 's gone ! ' 

And Allan said, ' I see it is a trick 

Got up betwixt you and the woman there. 

I must be taught my duty, and by you ! 

You knew my word was law, and yet you dared 

To slight it. Well — for I will take the boy ; 

But go you hence, and never see me more.' 

So saying, he took the boy that cried aloud 
And struggled hard. The wreath of flowers fell 100 

At Dora's feet. She bow'd upon her hands, 
And the boy's cry came to her from the field. 
More and more distant. She bow'd down her head, 
Remembering the day when first she came, 
And all the things that had been. She bow'd down 
And wept in secret ; and the reapers reap'd, 
And the sun fell, and all the land was dark. 

Then Dora went to Mary's house, and stood 
Upon the threshold. Mary saw the boy 
Was not with Dora. She broke out in praise no 

To God, that help'd her in her widowhood. 
And Dora said, ' My uncle took the boy ; 
But, Mary, let me live and work with you : 
He says that he will never see me more.' 
Then answer'd Mary, * This shall never be, 
That thou shouldst take my trouble on thyself: 
And, now I think, he shall not have the boy. 
For he will teach him hardness, and to slight 
His mother ; therefore thou and I will go, 
And I will have my boy, and bring him home ; 120 

And I will beg of him to take thee back : 
But if he will not take thee back again. 
Then thou and I will live within one house. 
And work for William's child, until he grows 
Of age to help us.' 

So the women kiss'd 
Each other, and set out, and reach'd the farm. 



30 DORA. 

The door was off the latch : they peep'd, and saw 

The boy set up betwixt his grandsire's knees, 

Who thrust him in the hollows of his arm, 

And clapt him on the hands and on the cheeks, 130 

Like one that loved him : and the lad stretch'd out 

And babbled for the golden seal, that hung 

From Allan's watch, and sparkled by the fire. 

Then they came in : but when the boy beheld 

His mother, he cried out to come to her : 

And Allan set him down, and Mary said : 

^ O father ! — if you let me call you so — 
I never came a-begging for myself. 
Or William, or this child ; but now I come 
For Dora : take her back ; she loves you well. 140 

Sir, when William died, he died at peace 
With all men ; for I ask'd him, and he said. 
He could not ever rue his marrying me — 

1 had been a patient wife : but, Sir, he said 
That he was wrong to cross his father thus : 

" God bless him ! " he said, '' and may he never know 

The troubles I have gone thro' ! ■' Then he turn'd 

His face and pass'd — unhappy that I am ! 

But now. Sir, let me have my boy, for you 

Will make him hard, and he will learn to slight 150 

His father's memory ; and take Dora back, 

And let all this be as it was before.' 

So Mary said, and Dora hid her face 
By Mary. There was silence in the room ; 
i\.nd all at once the old man burst in sobs : — 

^ I have been to blame — to blame. I have kill'd my son. 
I have kill'd him — but I loved him — my dear son. 
May God forgive me ! — I have been to blame. 
Kiss me, my children.' 

Then they clung about 
The old man's neck, and kiss'd him many times. 160 

And all the man was broken with remorse : 



GOD IV A. 31 

And all his love came back a hundredfold ; 

And for three hours he sobb'd o'er William's child 

Thinking of William. 

So those four abode 
Within one house together ; and as years 
Went forward, Mary took another mate ; 
But Dora lived unmarried till her death. 



GODIVA. 

/ waited for the train at Coventry ; 
I hung with grooms and porters o?t the bridge, 
To watch the three tall spires ; and there I shaped 
The city's ancient legend into this : — 

Not only we, the latest seed of Time, 
New men, that in the flying of a wheel 
Cry down the past, not only we, that prate 
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the people well, 
And loathed to see them overtax'd ; but she 
Did more, and underwent, and overcame, 
The woman of a thousand summers back, 
Godiva, wife to that grim Earl, who ruled 
In Coventry : for when he laid a tax 
Upon his town, and all the mothers brought 
Their children, clamoring, ' If we pay, we starve ! ' 
She sought her lord, and found him, where he strode 
About the hall, among his dogs, alone. 
His beard a foot before him, and his hair 
A yard behind. She told him of their tears, 
And pray'd him, ' If they pay this tax, they starve.' 
Whereat he stared, replying, half-amazed, 
* You would not let your little finger ache 



32 



CODIVA. 




For such as these V — ' But I would die/ said she. 

He laugh'd and swore by Peter and by Paul ; 

Then fillip'd at the diamond in her ear : 

^ Oh ay, ay, ay, you talk ! ' — ' Alas ! ' she said, 

' But prove me what it is I would not do.' 

And from a heart as rough as Esau's hand. 

He answer'd, ' Ride you naked thro' the town, 



GODIVA. ZZ 

And I repeal it ; ' and nodding, as in scorn, ' 30 

He parted, with great strides among liis dogs. 

So left alone, the passions of her mind, 
As winds from all the compass shift and blow, 
Made war upon each other for an hour. 
Till pity won. She sent a herald forth, 
And bade him cry, with sound of trumpet, all 
The hard condition ; but that she would loose 
The people : therefore, as they loved her well. 
From then till noon no foot should pace the street, 
No eye look down, she passing ; but that all 40 

Should keep within, door shut, and window barr'd. 

Then fled she to her inmost bower, and there 
Unclasp'd the wedded eagles of her belt, 
The grim Earl's gift ; but ever at a breath 
She linger'd, looking like a summer moon 
Half-dipt in cloud : anon she shook her head, 
And shower'd the rippled ringlets to her knee ; 
Unclad herself in haste ; adown the stair 
Stole on ; and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid 
From pillar unto pillar, until she reach'd so 

The gateway ; there she found her palfrey trapt 
In purple blazon'd with armorial gold. 

Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity : 
The deep air listen'd round her as she rode, 
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear. 
The litde wide-mouth'd heads upon the spout 
Had cunning eyes to see : the barking cur 
Made her cheek flame : her palfrey's foot-fall shot 
Light horrors thro' her pulses : the blind walls 
Were full of chinks and holes ; and overhead 60 

Fantastic gables, crowding, stared : but she 
Not less thro' all bore up, tifl, last, she saw 
The white-flower'd elder-thicket from the field 
Gleam thro' the Gothic archway in the wall. 
3 



34 THE DAY-DREAM. ^ 

Then she rode back, clothed on with chastity : 
And one low churl, compact of thankless earth. 
The fatal byword of all years to come. 
Boring a little auger-hole in fear, 
Peep'd — but his eyes, before they had their will. 
Were shrivell'd into darkness in his head. 
And dropt before him. So the Powers, who wait 
On noble deeds, cancell'd a sense misused ; 
And she, that knew not, pass'd : and all at once, 
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon 
Was clash'd and hammer'd from a hundred towers. 
One after one : but even then she gain'd 
Her bower ; whence reissuing, robed and crown'd, 
To meet her lord, she took the tax away 
And built herself an everlasting name. 



THE DAY-DREAM. 

PROLOGUE. 

O Lady Flora, let me speak : 

A pleasant hour has pass'd away 
While, dreaming on your damask cheek, 

The dewy sister-eyelids lay. 
As by the lattice you reclined, 

I went thro' many wayward moods 
To see you dreaming — and, behind, 

A summer crisp with shining woods. 
And I too dream'd, until at last 

Across my fancy, brooding warm, 
The reflex of a legend pass'd. 

And loosely settled into form. 



THE DAY-DREAM. 35 

And would you have the thought I had, 

And see the vision that I saw, 
Then take the broidery-frame, and add 

A crimson to the quaint macaw. 
And I will tell it. Turn your face. 

Nor look with that too-earnest eye — 
The rhymes are dazzled from their place, 

And order'd words asunder fly. 20 



THE SLEEPING PALACE. 



The varying year with blade and sheaf 

Clothes and reclothes the happy plains, 
Here rests the sap within the leaf, 

Here stays the blood along the veins. 
Faint shadows, vapors lightly curl'd, 

Faint murmurs from the meadows come, 
Like hints and echoes of the world 

To spirits folded in the womb. 

II. 

Soft lustre bathes the range of urns 

On every slanting terrace-lawn. 30 

The fountain to his place returns 

Deep in the garden lake withdrawn. 
Here droops the banner on the tower. 

On the hall-hearths the festal fires. 
The peacock in his laurel bower. 

The parrot in his gilded wires. 



$6 THE DAY-DREAM. 

III. 

Roof-haunting martins warm their eggs : 

In these, in those the life is stay'd. 
The mantles from the golden pegs 

Droop sleepily : no sound is made, ■ 40 

Not even of a gnat that sings. 

More like a picture seemeth all 
Than those old portraits of old kings, 

That watch the sleepers from the wall. 

IV. 

Here sits the butler with a flask 

Between his knees, half drain'd ; and there 
The wrinkled steward at his task, 

The maid-of-honor blooming fair ; 
The page has caught her hand in his : 

Her lips are sever'd as to speak : 50 

His own are pouted to a kiss : 

The blush is fix'd upon her cheek. 

V. 

Till all the hundred summers pass. 

The beams, that thro' the oriel shine. 
Make prisms in every carven glass. 

And beaker brimm'd with noble wine. 
Each baron at the banquet sleeps. 

Grave faces gather'd in a ring. 
His state the king reposing keeps. 

He must have been a jovial king. 60 

VI. 

All round a hedge upshoots, and shows 

At distance like a little wood ; 
Thorns, ivies, woodbine, mistletoes, 

And grapes with bunches red as blood ; 



THE DAY-DREAM. 37 

All creeping plants, a wall of green 

Close-matted, bur and brake and briar, 

And glimpsing over these, just seen, 
High up, the topmost palace spire. 

VII. 

When will the hundred summers die. 

And thought and time be born again, 70 

And newer knowledge, drawing nigh, 

Bring truth that sways the soul of men? 
Here all things in their place remain. 

As all were order'd, ages since. 
Come, Care and Pleasure, Hope and Pain, 

And bring the fated fairy prince ! 



THE SLEEPING BEAUTY. 

I. 

Year after year unto her feet. 

She lying on her couch alone. 
Across the purple coverlet, 

The maiden's jet-black hair has grown, 80 

On either side her tranced form 

Forth streaming from a braid of pearl : 
The slumberous light is rich and warm, 

And moves not on the rounded curl. 

II. 
The silk star-broider'd coverlid 

Unto her limbs itself doth mould 
Languidly ever ; and, amid 

Her full black ringlets downward roll'd. 
Glows forth each softly-shadow'd arm 

With bracelets of the diamond bright : 90 

Her constant beauty doth inform 

Stillness with love, and day with light. 



38 THE DAY-DREAM. 

III. 

She sleeps : her breathings are not heard 

In palace chambers far apart. 
The fragrant tresses are not stirr'd 

That lie upon her charmed heart. 
She sleeps : on either hand upswells 

The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest : 
She sleeps, nor dreams, but ever dwells 

A perfect form in perfect rest. 



THE ARRIVAL. 



All precious things, discover'd late, 

To those that seek them issue forth ; 
For love in sequel works with fate, 

And draws the veil from hidden worth. 
He travels far from other skies — 

His mantle glitters on the rocks — 
A fairy prince, with joyful eyes. 

And lighter-footed than the fox. 



n. 

The bodies and the bones of those 

That strove in other days to pass, 
Are wither'd in the thorny close, 

Or scatter'd blanching on the grass. 
He gazes on the silent dead : 

'■ They perish'd in their daring deeds. 
This proverb flashes thro' his head, 

* The many fail : the one succeeds.' 



THE DAY-DREAM. 39 

III. 
He comes, scarce knowing what he seeks : 

He breaks the hedge : he enters there : 
The color flies into his cheeks : 

He trusts to hght on something fair ; 120 

For all his life the charm did talk 

About his path, and hover near 
With words of promise in his walk. 

And whisper'd voices at his ear. 

IV. 

More close and close his footsteps wind : 

The Magic Music in his heart 
Beats quick and quicker, till he find 

The quiet chamber far apart. 
His spirit flutters like a lark, 

He stoops — to kiss her — on his knee. 130 

' Love, if thy tresses be so dark. 

How dark those hidden eyes must be ! ' 



THE REVIVAL. 



A TOUCH, a kiss ! the charm was snapt. 

There rose a noise of striking clocks, 
And feet that ran, and doors that clapt. 

And barking dogs, and crowing cocks ; 
A fuller light illumined all, 

A breeze thro' all the garden swept, 
A sudden hubbub shook the hall. 

And sixty feet the fountain leapt. 



40 



THE DAY-DREAM. 




THE REVIVAL. 



The hedge broke in, the banner blew, 

The butler drank, the steward scrawPd, 
The fire shot up, the martin flew. 

The parrot scream'd, the peacock squall'd, 
The maid and page renew'd their strife, 

The palace bang'd, and buzz'd and clackt. 
And all the long-pent stream of life 

Dash'd downward in a cataract. 



THE DAY-DREAM. 41 

III. 
And last with these the king awoke, 

And in his chair himself uprear'd, 150 

And yawn'd, and rubb'd his face, and spoke, 

' By holy rood, a royal beard ! 
Hovv^ say you ? we have slept, my lords. 

My beard has grown into my lap.' 
The barons swore, with many words, 

'T was but an after-dinner's nap. 

IV. 

' Pardy,' return'd the king, ' but still 

My joints are somewhat stiff or so. 
My lord, and shall we pass the bill 

I mention'd half an hour ago ? ' 160 

The chancellor, sedate and vain. 

In courteous words return'd reply ; 
But dallied with his golden chain. 

And, smiling, put the question by. 



THE DEPARTURE. 



And on her lover's arm she leant. 

And round her waist she felt it fold. 
And far across the hills they went 

In that new world which is the old : 
Across the hills, and far away 

Beyond their utmost purple rim, 170 

And deep into the dying day 

The happy princess follow'd him. 



I 'd sleep another hundred years, 
O love, for such another kiss ; ' 



42 THE DAY-DREAM. 

' O, wake for ever, love,' she hears, 
' O love, 't was such as this and this.' 

And o'er them many a sliding star, 
And many a merry wind was borne, 

And, stream'd thro' many a golden bar, 
The twilight melted into morn. 

III. 

' O eyes long laid in happy sleep ! ' 

' O happy sleep, that lightly fled ! ' 
' O happy kiss, that woke thy sleep ! ' 

' O love, thy kiss would wake the dead ! ' 
And o'er them many a flowing range 

Of vapor buoy'd the crescent-bark, 
And, rapt thro' many a rosy change. 

The twilight died into the dark. 

IV. 

* A hundred summers ! can it be ? 

And whither goest thou, tell me where ? ' 

* O, seek my father's court with me, 

For there are greater wonders there.' 
And o'er the hills, and far away 

Beyond their utmost purple rim, 
Beyond the night, across the day. 

Thro' all the world she follow'd him. 



MORAL. 

I. 

So, Lady Flora, take my lay, 
And if you find no moral there, 

Go, look in any glass and say, 
What moral is in being fair. 



LADY CLARE. 43 

O, to what uses shall we put 

The wildweed-flower that simply blows ? 
And is there any moral shut 

Within the bosom of the rose ? 



But any man that walks the mead, 

In bud or blade, or bloom, may find, 
According as his humors lead, 

A meaning suited to his mind. 
And liberal applications lie 

In Art like Nature, dearest friend ; 
So 't were to cramp its use, if I 

Should hook it to some useful end. 



LADY CLARE. 

It was the time when lilies blow. 
And clouds are highest up in air, 

Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doe 
To give his cousin, Lady Clare. 

I trow they did not part in scorn : 
Lovers long-betroth'd were they : 

They two will wed the morrow morn : 
God's blessing on the day ! 

' He does not love me for my birth, 
Nor for my lands so broad and fair ; 

He loves me for my own true worth. 
And that is well,' said Lady Clare. . 



44 LADY CLARE. 

In there came old Alice the nurse, 

Said, ' Who was this that went from thee ? ' 

* It was my cousin,' said Lady Clare, 

' To-morrow he weds with me.' 

' O God be thank'd ! ' said Alice the nurse, 
' That all comes round so just and fair : 

Lord Ronald is heir of all your lands. 

And you are 7iot the Lady Clare.' 20 

' Are ye out of your mind, my nurse, my nurse ? ' 
Said Lady Clare, ' that ye speak so wild ? ' 

' As God 's above,' said Alice the nurse, 
' I speak the truth : you are my child. 

* The old Earl's daughter died at my breast ; 

I speak the truth, as I live by bread ! 
I buried her like my own sweet child, 
And put my child in her stead.' 

* Falsely, falsely have ye done, 

O mother,' she said, * if this be true, 30 

To keep the best man under the sun 
So many years from his due.' 

* Nay now, my child,' said Alice the nurse, 

' But keep the secret for your life. 
And all you have will be Lord Ronald's, 
When you are man and wife.' 

' If I 'm a beggar born,' she said, 

' I will speak out, for I dare not lie. 
Pull off, pull off, the brooch of gold. 

And fling the diamond necklace by.' 40 

' Nay now, my child,' said Alice the nurse, 

* But keep the secret all ye can.' 
She said, ' Not so : but I will know 

If there be any faith in man.' 



LADY CLARE. 45 

* Nay now, what faith ? ' said Alice the nurse, 

'The man will cleave unto his right.' 
' And he shall have it,' the lady replied, 
' Tho' I should die to-night.' 

* Yet give one kiss to your mother dear ! 

Alas, my child, I sinn'd for thee.' 50 

* O mother, mother, mother,' she said, 

' So strange it seems to me. 

* Yet here 's a kiss for my mother dear. 

My mother dear, if this be so, 
And lay your hand upon my head. 
And bless me, mother, ere I go.' 

She clad herself in a russet gown. 

She was no longer Lady Clare : 
She went by dale, and she went by down, 

With a single rose in her hair. 60 

The lily-white doe Lord Ronald had brought 

Leapt up from where she lay, 
Dropt her head in the maiden's hand, 

And follow'd her all the way. 

Down stept Lord Ronald from his tower : 
' O Lady Clare, you shame your worth ! 

Why come you drest like a village maid. 
That are the flower of the earth ? ' 

* If I come drest like a village maid, 

I am but as my fortunes are : 7° 

I am a beggar born,' she said, 
'And not the Lady Clare.' 

* Play me no tricks,' said Lord Ronald, 

' For I am yours in word and in deed. 
Play me no tricks,' said Lord Ronald, 
' Your riddle is hard to read.' 



46 THE CAPTAIN. 

O, and proudly stood she up ! 

Her heart within her did not fail : 
She look'd into Lord Ronald's eyes, 

And told him all her nurse's tale. So 

He laugh' d a laugh of merry scorn : 

He turn'd and kiss'd her where she stood : 

' If you are not the heiress born, 

And 1/ said he, ' the next in blood — 

* If you are not the heiress born, 

And I,' said he, ' the lawful heir, 
We two will wed to-morrow morn, 

And you shall still be Lady Clare.' 



THE CAPTAIN. 

A LEGEND OF THE NAVY. 

He that only rules by terror 

Doeth grievous wrong. 
Deep as Hell I count his error. 

Let him hear my song. 
Brave the Captain was : the seamen 

Made a gallant crew. 
Gallant sons of English freemen. 

Sailors bold and true. 
But they hated his oppression ; 

Stern he was and rash. 
So for every light transgression 

Doom'd them to the lash. 



THE CAPTAIN. 



47 








Day by day more harsh and cruel 

Seem'd the Captain's mood. 
Secret wrath like smother'd fuel 

Burnt in each man's blood. 
Yet he hoped to purchase glory, 

Hoped to make the name 
Of his vessel great in story, 

Wheresoe'er he came. 



48 THE CAPTAIN. 

So they pass'd by capes and islands, 

Many a harbor-mouth, 
Sailing under palmy highlands 

Far within the South. 
On a day when they were going 

O'er the lone expanse, 
In the north, her canvas flowing, 

Rose a ship of France. 
Then the Captain's color heighten'd, 

Joyful came his speech ; 30 

But a cloudy gladness lighten'd 

In the eyes of each. 
* Chase,' he said : the ship flew forward, 

And the wind did blow ; 
Stately, lightly, went she Norward, 

Till she near'd the foe. 
Then they look'd at him they hated, 

Had what they desired : 
Mute with folded arms they waited — 

Not a gun was fired. 40 

But they heard the foeman's thunder 

Roaring out their doom ; 
All the air was torn in sunder, 

Crashing went the boom. 
Spars were splinter'd, decks were shatter'd. 

Bullets fell like rain ; 
Over mast and deck were scatter'd 

Blood and brains of men. 
Spars were splinter'd ; decks were broken : 

Every mother's son — 5° 

Down they dropt — no word was spoken — 

Each beside his gun. 
On the decks as they were lying, 

Were their faces grim. 
In their blood, as they lay dying, 

Did they smile on him. 



THE BEGGAR MAID. 49 

Those, in whom he had reliance 

For his noble name, 
With one smile of still defiance 

Sold him unto shame. 6° 

Shame and wrath his heart confounded, 

Pale he turn'd and red, 
Till himself was deadly wounded 

Falling on the dead. 
Dismal error ! fearful slaughter ! 

Years have wander'd by, 
Side by side beneath the water 

Crew and Captain lie ; 
There the sunlit ocean tosses 

O'er them mouldering, 7° 

And the lonely seabird crosses 

With one waft of the wing. 



THE BEGGAR MAID. 

Her arms across her breast she laid ; 

She was more fair than words can say : 
Bare-footed came the beggar maid 

Before the king Cophetua. 
In robe and crown the king stept down, 

To meet and greet her on her way ; 
* It is no wonder,' said the lords, 

' She is more beautiful than day.' 

As shines the moon in clouded skies, 
She in her poor attire was seen : 

One praised her ankles, one her eyes, 
One her dark hair and lovesome mien. 
4 



50 



THE BEGGAR MAID. 




So sweet a face, such angel grace, 
In all that land had never been : 

Cophetua sware a royal oath : 

' This beggar maid shall be my queen ! ' 



THE VOYAGE, 5^ 



THE VOYAGE. 



We left behind the painted buoy 

That tosses at the harbor-mouth ; 
And madly danced our hearts with joy, 

As fast we fleeted to the South : 
How fresh was every sight and sound 

On open main or winding shore ! 
We knew the merry world was round, 

And we might sail for evermore. 

II. 

Warm broke the breeze against the brow, 

Dry sang the tackle, sang the sail : 
The Lady's-head upon the prow 

Caught the shrill salt, and sheer'd the gale. 
The broad seas swell'd to meet the keel, 

And swept behind ; so quick the run, 
We felt the good ship shake and reel. 

We seem'd to sail into the sun 1 

III. 

How oft we saw the sun retire, 

And burn the threshold of the night. 
Fall from his ocean-lane of fire, 

And sleep beneath his pillar'd light ! 
How oft the purple-skirted robe 

Of twilight slowly downward drawn, 
As thro' the slumber of the globe 

Again we dash'd into the dawn ! 



THE VOYAGE. 

IV. 

New stars all night above the brim 

Of waters lighten'd into view ; 
They climb'd as quickly, for the rim 

Changed every moment as we flew. 
Far ran the naked moon across 

The houseless ocean's heaving field, 
Or flying shone, the silver boss 

Of her own halo's dusky shield ; 

V. 

The peaky islet shifted shapes. 

High towns on hills were dimly seen, 
We pass'd long lines of Northern capes 

And dewy Northern meadows green. 
We came to warmer waves, and deep 

Across the boundless east we drove, 
Where those long swells of breaker sweep 

The nutmeg rocks and isles of clove. 

VI. 

By peaks that flamed, or, all in shade, 

Gloom'd the low coast and quivering brine 
With ashy rains, that spreading made 

Fantastic plume or sable pine ; 
By sands and steaming flats, and floods 

Of mighty mouth, we scudded fast, 
And hills and scarlet-mingled woods 

Glow'd for a moment as we past. 

VII. 

O hundred shores of happy climes, 
How swiftly stream'd ye by the bark ! 

At times the whole sea burn'd, at times 
With wakes of fire we tore the dark ; 



THE VOYAGE. 53 

At times a carven craft would shoot 

From havens hid in fairy bowers, 
With naked Hmbs and flowers and fruit, 

But we nor paused for fruit nor flowers. 

VIII. 

For one fair Vision ever fled 

Down the waste waters day and night, 
And still we follow'd where she led, 

In hope to gain upon her flight. 60 

Her face was evermore unseen. 

And fixt upon the far sea-line ; 
But each man murmur'd, ' O my Queen, 

I follow till I make thee mine.' 

IX. 

And now we lost her, now she gleam'd 

Like Fancy made of golden air. 
Now nearer to the prow she seem'd 

Like Virtue firm, like Knowledge fair. 
Now high on waves that idly burst 

Like Heavenly Hope she crown'd the sea, 70 

And now, the bloodless point reversed, 

She bore the blade of Liberty. 

X. 

And only one among us — him 

We pleased not — he was seldom pleased : 
He saw not far : his eyes were dim : 

But ours he swore were all diseased. 
* A ship of fools,' he shriek'd in spite, 

' A ship of fools,' he sneer'd and wept. 
And overboard one stormy night 

He cast his body, and on we swept. 80 



54 THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 

XI. 
And never sail of ours was furl'd, 

Nor anchor dropt at eve or morn ; 
We loved the glories of the world, 

But laws of nature were our scorn. 
For blasts would rise and rave and cease, 

But whence were those that drove the sail 
Across the whirlwind's heart of peace. 

And to and thro' the counter gale ? 

XII. 

Again to colder climes we came, 

For still we folio w'd where she led : 90 

Now mate is blind and captain lame, 

And half the crew are sick or dead, 
But, bhnd or lame or sick or sound. 

We follow that which flies before : 
We know the merry world is round, 

And we may sail for evermore. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 



Half a league, half a league, 
Half a league onward, 

All in the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 

*■ Forward, the Light Brigade ! 

Charge for the guns ! ' he said : 

Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 



55 




II. 

' Forward, the Light Brigade 
Was there a man dismay'd? 
Not tho' the soldier knew 

Some one had blunder'd : 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why. 
Theirs but to do and die : 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 



III. 

Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them. 
Cannon in front of them 

Volley'd and thunder'd ; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well, 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell 

Rode the six hundred. 



56 THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 

IV. 

Flash'd all their sabres bare, 

Flash'd as they turn'd in air, 

Sabring the gunners there, 

Charging an army, while 30 

All the world wonder'd : 
Plunged in the battery-smoke, 
Right thro' the line they broke ; 
Cossack and Russian 
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke 

Shatter'd and sunder'd. 
Then they rode back, but not, 

Not the six hundred. 

V. 

Cannon to right of them, 

Cannon to left of them, 40 

Cannon behind them 

Volley'd and thunder'd ; 
Storm 'd at with shot and shell. 
While horse and hero fell, 
They that had fought so well 
Came thro' the jaws of Death 
Back from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them. 

Left of six hundred. 



VI. 

When can their glory fade ? 
O the wild charge they made ! 

All the world wonder'd. 
Honor the charge they made ! 
Honor the Light Brigade, 

Noble six hundred ! 



THE SAILOR BOY. 



57 




THE SAILOR BOY. 

He rose at dawn and, fired with hope, 
Shot o'er the seething harbor-bar, 

And reach'd the ship and caught the rope, 
And whistled to the morning star. 

And while he whistled long and loud 
He heard a fierce mermaiden cry, 

' O boy, tho' thou art young and proud, 
I see the place where thou wilt lie. 



' The sands and yeasty surges mix 
In caves about the dreary bay, 

And on thy ribs the limpet sticks, 

And in thy heart the scrawl shall play.' 



58 THE VICTIM. 

' Fool/ he answer'd, ' death is sure 

To those that stay and those that roam, 

But I will nevermore endure 

To sit with empty hands at home. 

' My mother clings about my neck, 
My sisters crying, " Stay for shame ; " 

My father raves of death and wreck, 

They are all to blame, they are all to blame. 

' God help me ! save I take my part 

Of danger on the roaring sea, 
A devil rises in my heart. 

Far worse than any death to me.' 



THE VICTIM. 



A PLAGUE upon the people fell, 
A famine after laid them low, 
Then thorpe and byre arose in fire, 

For on them brake the sudden foe ; 
So thick they died the people cried, 

' The Gods are moved against the land.' 
The Priest in horror about his altar 
To Thor and Odin hfted a hand : 
' Help us from famine 
And plague and strife ! 
What would you have of us ? 
Human Hfe? 
Were it our nearest. 
Were it our dearest, 
(Answer, O answer ! ) 
We e^ive vou his life.' 



THE VICTIM. 59 



But still the foeman spoil'd and burn'd, 

And cattle died, and deer in wood, 
And bird in air, and fishes turn'd 

And whiten'd all the rolling flood ; 20 

And dead men lay all over the way. 

Or down in a furrow scathed with flame : 
And ever and aye the Priesthood moan'd. 
Till at last it seem'd that an answer came : 
' The King is happy 
In child and wife ; 
Take you his dearest, 
Give us a life.' 

III. 

The Priest went out by heath and hill ; 

The King was hunting in the wild ; 30 

They found the mother sitting still ; 

She cast her arms about the child. 
The child was only eight summers old. 

His beauty still with his years increased, 
His face was ruddy, his hair was gold. 
He seem'd a victim due to the priest. 
The Priest beheld him. 
And cried with joy, 
' The Gods have answer'd : 
We give them the boy.' 40 

rv. 

The King return'd from out the wild, 

He bore but little game in hand ; 
The mother said, ' They have taken the child 

To spill his blood and heal the land : 
The land is sick, the people diseased. 

And blight and famine on all the lea : 



6o THE VICTIM. 

The holy Gods, they must be appeased, 

So I pray you tell the truth to me. 

They have taken our son. 

They will have his life. so 

Is he your dearest? 
Or I, the wife?' 

V. 

The King bent low, with hand on brow, 

He stay'd his arms upon his knee : 
' O wife, what use to answer now ? 

For now the Priest has judged for me.' 
The King was shaken with holy fear ; 

' The Gods,' he said, ' would have chosen well ; 
Yet both are near, and both are dear. 

And which the dearest I cannot tell ! ' 60 

But the Priest was happy. 
His victim won : 
' We have his dearest. 
His only son ! ' 

VI. 

The rites prepared, the victim bared, 

The knife uprising toward the blow. 
To the altar-stone she sprang alone, 

• Me, not my darling, no ! ' 
He caught her away with a sudden cry ; 

Suddenly from him brake his wife, 70 

And shrieking ' / am his dearest, I — 
/am his dearest ! ' rush'd on the knife. 
And the Priest was happy : 
' O Father Odin, 
We give you a life. 
Which was his nearest? 
Who was his dearest? 
The Gods have answer'd ; 
We give them the wife ! ' 



THE REVENGE. 6 1 

THE REVENGE. 

A BALLAD OF THE FLEET. 
L 

x'\t Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, 
And a pinnace, like a flutter' d bird, came flying from far away : 
* Spanish ships of war at sea ! we have sighted fifty-three ! ' 
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard : ' 'Fore God, I am no 

coward ; 
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear, 
And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick. 
We are six ships of the line ; can we fight with fifty-three ? ' 

n. 

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville : ' I know you are no coward ; 
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again. 
But I 've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore. lo 
I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord 

Howard, 
To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.' 

in. 

So Lord Howard past away with five ships of war that day, 
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven ; 
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land 
Very carefully and slow. 
Men of Bideford in Devon, 
And we laid them on the ballast down below ; 
For we brought them all aboard, 

And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to 
Spain, 20 

To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord. 



62 THE REVENGE. 

IV. 

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight, 
And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight, 
With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow. 
' Shall we figlit or shall we fly ? 
Good Sir Richard, tell us now, 
For to fight is but to die ! 

There '11 be little of us left by the time this sun be set.' 
And Sir Richard said again : ' We be all good English men. 
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil, 3° 
For I never turn'd my back upon Don or devil yet.' 

V. 

Sir Richard spoke and he laugh'd, and we roar'd a hurrah, 

and so 
The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe. 
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below ; 
For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen 
And the little Revenge ran on thro' the long sea-lane between. 



Thousands of their soldiers look'd down from their decks and 

laugh'd. 
Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft 
Running on and on, till delay'd 
By their mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred 

tons, 40 

And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns, 
Took the breath from our sails, and we stay'd. 

VII. 

And while now the great San Philip hung above us like a cloud 

Whence the thunderbolt will fall 

Long and loud, 

Four galleons drew away 



THE REVENGE. d^ 

From the Spanish fleet that day, 

And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay, 

And the battle-thunder broke from them all. 

VIII. 

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and 
went, 50 

Having that within her womb that had left her ill content ; 

And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand 
to hand, 

For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers, 

And a dozen times we shook 'em off as a dog that shakes his 
ears 

When he leaps from the water to the land. 

IX. 

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the 
summer sea. 

But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty- 
three. 

Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons 
came, 

Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her batde-thunder 
and flame ; 

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead 
and her shame. 60 

For some were sunk and many were shatter'd, and so could 
fight us no more — 

God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before ? 

X. 

For he said '■ Fight on ! fight on ! ' 

Tho' his vessel was all but a wreck ; 

And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was 

gone. 
With a grisly wound to be drest he had left the deck, 
But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead, 



64 THE REVENGE. 

And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head, 
And he said '■ Fight on ! fight on ! ' 

XI. 

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the 

summer sea, ^o 

And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a 

ring ; 
But they dared not touch us again, for they fear'd that we still 

could sting, 
So they watch'd what the end would be. 
And we had not fought them in vain, 
But in perilous plight were we. 
Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain, 
And half of the rest of us maim'd for life 
In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife ; 
And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark 

and cold. 
And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all 

of it spent ; So 

And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side ; 
But Sir Richard cried in his English pride, 
' We have fought such a fight for a day and a night 
As may never be fought again ! 
We have won great glory, my men ! 
And a day less or more 
At sea or ashore. 
We die — does it matter when ? 

Sink me the ship, Master Gunner — sink her, split her in twain ! 
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain ! ' 90 

XII. 

And the gunner said ' Ay, ay,' but the seamen made reply : 

' We have children, we have wives, 

And the Lord hath spared our lives. 

We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go ; 



THE REVENGE. 65 

We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow.' 
And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the foe. 



XIII. 

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then, 
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last. 
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign 

grace ; 
But he rose upon their decks, and he cried : 100 

' I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true ; 
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do : 
With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die ! ' 
And he fell upon their decks, and he died. 



XIV. 

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true, 
And had holden the power and glory of Spain so cheap 
That he dared her with one little ship and his English few ; 
Was he devil or man ? He was devil for aught they knew, 
But they sank his body with honor down into the deep. 
And they mann'd the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew, no 
And away she sail'd with her loss and long'd for her own ; 
When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from sleep, 
And the water began to heave and the weather to moan. 
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew. 
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew, 
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and 

their flags, 
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd navy 

of Spain, 
And the litde Revenge herself went down by the island crags 
To be lost evermore in the main. 



66 THE DEFENCE OF LUC KNOW. 



THE DEFENCE OF LUCKNOW. 

I. 

Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, hast 

thou 
Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle-cry ! 
Never with mightier glory than when we had rear'd thee on high 
Flying at top of the roofs in the ghastly siege of Lucknow — 
Shot thro' the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee anew, 
And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew. 

II. 

Frail were the works that defended the hold that we held with 

our lives — 
Women and children among us, God help them, our children 

and wives ! 
Hold it we might — and for fifteen days or for twenty at most. 
' Never surrender, I charge you, but every man die at his 

post ! ' lo 

Voice of the dead whom we loved, our Lawrence the best of 

the brave : 
Cold were his brows when we kiss'd him — we laid him that 

night in his grave. 
^ Every man die at his post ! ' and there hail'd on our houses 

and halls 
Death from their rifle-bullets, and death from their cannon-balls, 
Death in our innermost chamber, and death at our slight 

barricade. 
Death while we stood with the musket, and death while we 

stoopt to the spade. 
Death to the dying, and wounds to the wounded, for often 

there fell, 
Striking the hospital wall, crashing thro' it, their shot and their 

shell. 



THE DEFENCE OF LUC KNOW. 67 

Death — for their spies were among us, their marksmen were 

told of our best, 
So that the brute bullet broke thro' the brain that could think 

for the rest ; 20 

Bullets would sing by our foreheads, and bullets would rain at 

our feet — 
Fire from ten thousand at once of the rebels that girdled us 

round — 
Death at the glimpse of a finger from over the breadth of a 

street, 
Death from the heights of the mosque and the palace, and 

death in the ground ! 
Mine ? yes, a mine ! Countermine ! down, down ! and creep 

thro' the hole ! 
Keep the revolver in hand ! you can hear him — the mur- 
derous mole ! 
Quiet, ah ! quiet — wait till the point of the pickaxe be thro' ! 
CHck with the pick, coming nearer and nearer again than 

before — 
Now let it speak, and you fire, and the dark pioneer is no more ; 
And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England 

blew ! 30 

III. 

Ay, but the foe sprung his mine many times, and it chanced on 

a day 
Soon as the blast of that underground thunderclap echo'd away. 
Dark thro' the smoke and the sulphur like so many fiends in 

their hell — 
Cannon-shot, musket-shot, volley on volley, and yell upon yell — 
Fiercely on all the defences our myriad enemy fell. 
What have they done ? where is it ? Out yonder. Guard the 

Redan ! 
Storm at the Water-gate ! storm at the Bailey-gate ! storm, and 

it ran 



6S THE DEFENCE OF LUC KNOW. 

Surging and swaying all round us,, as ocean on every side 

Plunges and heaves at a bank that is daily drown'd by the tide — 

So many thousands that if they be bold enough, who shall 
escape ? 40 

Kill or be kill'd, live or die, they shall know we are soldiers 
and men ! 

Ready ! take aim at their leaders — their masses are gapp'd 
with our grape — 

Backward they reel like the wave, like the wave flinging for- 
ward again. 

Flying and foil'd at the last by the handful they could not 
subdue ; 

And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew. 

IV. 

Handful of men as we were, we were English in heart and in 

limb. 
Strong with the strength of the race to conimand, to obey, to 

endure. 
Each of us fought as if hope for the garrison hung but on him ; 
Still — could we watch at all points ? we were every day fewer 

and fewer. 
There was a whisper among us, but only a whisper that 

pass'd : 50 

' Children and wives — if the tigers leap into the fold un- 
awares — 
Every man die at his post ^ and the foe may outlive us at 

last — 
Better to fall by the hands that they love, than to fall into theirs ! ' 
Roar upon roar in a moment two mines by the enemy sprung 
Clove into perilous chasms our walls and our poor palisades. 
Rifleman, true is your heart, but be sure that your hand be as 

true ! 
Sharp is the fire of assault, better aimed are your flank 

fusillades — 



THE DEFENCE OF LUC KNOW. 69 

Twice do we hurl them to earth from the ladders to which 

they had clung, 
Twice from the ditch where they shelter we drive them with 

hand-grenades ; 
And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England 

blew. 60 

V. 

Then on another wild morning another wild earthquake out-tore 
Clean from our lines of defence ten or twelve good paces or 

more. 
Rifleman, high on the roof, hidden there from the light of the 

sun — 
One has leapt up on the breach, crying out: 'Follow me, 

follow me ! ' — 
Mark him — he falls ! then another, and him too, and down 

goes he. 
Had they been bold enough then, who can tell but the traitors 

had won ? 
Boardings and rafters and doors — an embrasure ! make way 

for the gun ! 
Now double-charge it with grape ! It is charged and we fire, 

and they run. 
Praise to our Indian brothers, and let the dark face have his 

due ! 
Thanks to the kindly dark faces who fought with us, faithful 

and few, 70 

Fought with the bravest among us, and drove them, and smote 

them, and slew. 
That ever upon the topmost roof our banner in India blew. 

VI. 

Men will forget what we suffer and not what we do. We can 

fight ! 
But to be soldier all day and be sentinel all thro' the night — 



70 'THE DEFENCE OF LUC KNOW. 

Ever the mine and assault, our sallies, their lying alarms. 
Bugles and drums in the darkness, and shoutings and sound- 
ings to arms. 
Ever the labor of fifty that had to be done by five, 
Ever the marvel among us that one should be left alive, 
Ever the day with its traitorous death from the loopholes around, 
Ever the night with its cofifinless corpse to be laid in the 
ground, so 

Heat like the mouth of a hell, or a deluge of cataract skies. 
Stench of old offal decaying, and infinite torment of flies. 
Thoughts of the breezes of May blowing over an English field. 
Cholera, scurvy, and fever, the wound that would not be heal'd, 
Lopping away of the limb by the pitiful-pitiless knife, — 
Torture and trouble in vain, — for it never could save us a life. 
Valor of delicate women who tended the hospital bed. 
Horror of women in travail among the dying and dead. 
Grief for our perishing children, and never a moment for grief, 
Toil and ineffable weariness, faltering hopes of relief, 90 

Havelock baffled, or beaten, or butcher'd for all that we knew — 
Then day and night, day and night, coming down on the still- 

shatter'd walls 
Millions of musket-bullets, and thousands of cannon-balls — 
But ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew. 

VII. 

Hark cannonade, fusillade ! is it true what was told by the scout, 
Outram and Havelock breaking their way through the fell 

mutineers ? 
Surely the pibroch of Europe is ringing again in our ears ! 
All on a sudden the garrison utter a jubilant shout, 
Havelock's glorious Highlanders answer with conquering 

cheers. 
Sick from the hospital echo them, women and children come 

out, 100 

Blessing the wholesome white faces of Havelock's good fusileers, 



THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 71 

Kissing the war-Iiarden'd hand of the Highlander wet with 

their tears ! 
Dance to the pibroch ! — saved ! we are saved ! — is it you ? 

is it you? 
Saved by the valor of Havelock, saved by the blessing of 

Heaven ! 
' Hold it for fifteen days ! ' we have held it for eighty-seven ! 
And ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England 

blew. 



THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 

(founded on an IRISH LEGEND. A.D. 7OO.) 



I WAS the chief of the race — he had stricken my father dead — 
But I gather'd my fellows together, I swore I would strike off 

his head. 
Each of them look'd like a king, and was noble in birth as in 

worth. 
And each of them boasted he sprang from the oldest race 

upon earth. 
Each was as brave in the fight as the bravest hero of song, 
And each of them liefer had died than have done one another 

a wrong. 
He lived on an isle in the ocean — we sail'd on a Friday 

morn — 
He that had slain my father the day before I was born. 

II. 

And we came to the isle in the ocean, and there on the shore 

was he. 
But a sudden blast blew us out and away thro' a boundless 

sea. 10 



72 THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 

III. 
And we came to the Silent Isle that we never had touch'd at 

before, 
Where a silent ocean always broke on a silent shore, 
And the brooks glitter'd on in the light without sound, and 

the long waterfalls 
Pour'd in a thunderless plunge to the base of the mountain 

walls. 
And the poplar and cypress unshaken by storm flourish'd up 

beyond sight. 
And the pine shot aloft from the crag to an unbelievable height, 
And high in the heaven above it there flickefd a songless lark, 
And the cock could n't crow, and the bull could n't low, and 

the dog couldn't bark. 
And round it we went, and thro' it, but never a murmur, a 

breath — 
It was all of it fair as life, it was all of it quiet as death, 20 

And we hated the beautiful Isle, for whenever we strove to 

speak 
Our voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse- 

shriek ; 
And the men that were mighty of tongue and could raise such 

a battle-cry 
That a hundred who heard it would rush on a thousand lances 

and die — 
O they to be dumb'd by the charm ! — so fluster'd with anger 

were they 
They almost fell on each other ; but after we sail'd away. 

IV. 

And we came to the Isle of Shouting, we landed, a score of 

wild birds 
Cried from the topmost summit with human voices and words ; 
Once in an hour they cried, and whenever their voices peal'd 
The steer fell down at the plough and the harvest died from the 

field, '' 30 



THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 73 

And the men dropt dead in the valleys and half of the cattle 

went lame, 
And the roof sank in on the hearth, and the dwelling broke 

into flame ; 
And the shouting of these wild birds ran into the hearts of my 

crew, 
Till they shouted along with the shouting and seized one 

another and slew ; 
But I drew them the one from the other ; I saw that we could 

not stay, 
And we left the dead to the birds and we sail'd with our 

wounded away. 



And we came to the Isle of Flowers : their breath met us out 

on the seas, 
For the Spring and the middle Summer sat each on the lap of 

the breeze ; 
And the red passion-flower to the cliffs, and the dark-blue 

clematis, clung, 
And starr'd with a myriad blossom the long convolvulus 

hung ; 40 

And the topmost spire of the motmtain was lilies in lieu of snow. 
And the lilies like glaciers winded down, running out below 
Thro' the fire of the tulip and poppy, tlie blaze of gorse, and 

the blush 
Of millions of roses that sprang without leaf or a thorn from 

the bush ; 
And the whole isle-side flashing down from the peak without 

ever a tree 
Swept like a torrent of gems from the sky to the blue of the sea ; 
And we roll'd upon capes of crocus and vaunted our kith and 

our kin. 
And we vvallow'd in beds of lilies, and chanted the triumph of 

Finn, 



74 THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 

Till each like a golden image was pollen'd from head to feet, 

And each was as dry as a cricket, with thirst in the middle- 
day heat. 50 

Blossom and blossom, and promise of blossom, but never a 
fruit ! 

And we hated the Flowering Isle, as we hated the isle that 
was mute. 

And we tore up the flowers by the million and flung them in 
bight and bay. 

And we left but a naked rock, and in anger we sail'd away. 

VI. 

And we came to the Isle of Fruits : all round from the cliffs 

and the capes. 
Purple or amber, dangled a hundred fathom of grapes, 
And the warm melon lay like a little sun on the tawny sand, 
And the fig ran up from the beach and rioted over the land, 
And the mountain arose like a jewell'd throne thro' the 

fragrant air, 
Glowing with all-color'd plums and with golden masses of 

pear, 60 

And the crimson and scarlet of berries that flamed upon bine 

and vine, 
But in every berry and fruit was the poisonous pleasure of wine ; 
And the peak of the mountain was apples, the hugest that 

ever were seen, 
And they prest, as they grew, on each other, with hardly a 

leaflet between, 
And all of them redder than rosiest health or than utterest 

shame. 
And setting, when Even descended, the very sunset aflame ; 
And we stay'd three days, and we gorged and we madden'd, 

till every one drew 
His sword on his fellow to slay him, and ever they struck and 

they slew ; 



THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 75 

And myself, I had eaten but sparely, and fought till I sunder'd 

the fray. 
Then I bade them remember my father's death, and we sail'd 

away. 7° 

VII. 

And we came to the Isle of Fire : we were lured by the light 

from afar. 
For the peak sent up one league of fire to the Northern Star ; 
Lured by the glare and the blare, but scarcely could stand 

upright, 
For the whole isle shudder'd and shook like a man in a mortal 

affright ; 
We were giddy besides with the fruits we had gorged, and so 

crazed that at last 
There were some leap'd into the fire ; and away we sail'd, 

and we past 
Over that undersea isle, where the water is clearer than air : 
Down we look'd : what a garden ! O bliss, what a Paradise 

there ! 
Towers of a happier time, low down in a rainbow deep 
Silent palaces, quiet fields of eternal sleep ! 80 

And three of the gentlest and best of my people, whatever I 

could say, 
Plunged head down in the sea, and the Paradise trembled 

away. 

VIII. 

And we came to the Bounteous Isle, where the heavens lean 

low on the land, 
And ever at dawn from the cloud glitter'd o'er us a sun-bright 

hand. 
Then it open'd and dropt at the side of each man, as he rose 

from his rest. 
Bread enough for his need till the laborless day dipt under 

the West ; 



76 THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 

And we wander'd about it and thro' it. O never was time so 

good ! 
And we sang of the triumphs of Finn, and the boast of our 

ancient blood. 
And we gazed at the wandering wave as we sat by the gurgle 

of springs, 
And we chanted the songs of the Bards and the glories of 

fairy kings ; 90 

But at length we began to be weary, to sigh, and to stretch 

and yawn, 
Till we hated the Bounteous Isle and the sun-bright hand of 

the dawn, 
For there was not an enemy near, but the whole green isle 

was our own, 
And we took to playing at ball, and we took to throwing the 

stone, 
And we took to playing at battle, but that was a perilous play. 
For the passion of battle was in us, we slew and we sail'd away. 

IX. 

And we came to the Isle of Witches and heard their musical 

cry — 
' Come to us, O come, come ! ' in the stormy red of a sky 
Dashing the fires and the shadows of dawn on the beautiful 

shapes. 
For a wild witch naked as heaven stood on each of the loftiest 

capes, 100 

And a hundred ranged on the rock like white sea-birds in 

a row. 
And a hundred gamboU'd and pranced on the wrecks in the 

sand below, 
And a hundred splash'd from the ledges, and bosom'd the 

burst of the spray, 
But I knew we should fall on each other, and hastily sail'd 

away. 



THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 77 

X. 

And we came in an evil time to the Isle of the Double Towers, 
One was of smooth-cut stone, one carved all over with flowers, 
But an earthquake always moved in the hollows under the dells,' 
And they shock'd on each other and butted each other with 

clashing of bells, 
And the daws flew out of the Towers and jangled and wrangled 

in vain, 
And the clash and boom of the bells rang into the heart and 

the brain, no 

Till the passion of battle was on us, and all ^took sides with 

the Towers, 
There were some for the clean-cut stone, there were more for 

the carven flowers, 
And the wrathful thunder of God peal'd over us all the day, 
For the one half slew the other, and after we sail'd away. 

XI. 

And we came to the Isle of a Saint who had sail'd with 

Saint Brendan of yore, 
He had lived ever since on the isle and his winters were 

fifteen score. 
And his voice was low as from other worlds, and his eyes 

were sweet, 
And his white hair sank to his heels and his white beard fell 

to his feet. 
And he spake to me, ' O Maeldune, let be this purpose of thine ! 
Remember the words of the Lord when he told us " Vengeance 

is mine ! " 120 

His fathers have slain thy fathers in war or in single strife. 
Thy fathers have slain his fathers, each taken a life for a life, 
Thy father had slain his father, how long shall the murder last ? 
Go back to the Isle of Finn and suffer the past to be past.' 



78 THE POET'S SONG. 

And we kiss'd the fringe of his beard and we pray'd as we 

heard him pray, 
And the holy man he assoil'd us, and sadly we sail'd away. 

XII. 

And we came to the isle we were blown from, and there on 

the shore was he, 
The man that had slain my father. I saw him and let him be. 
O weary was I of the travel, the trouble, the strife, and the sin. 
When I landed again, with a tithe of my men, on the Isle of 

Finn. 130 



THE POET'S SONG. 

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose. 

He pass'd by the town and out of the street, 
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun. 

And waves of shadow went over the wheat, 
And he sat him down in a lonely place, 

And chanted a melody loud and sweet, 
That made the wild- swan pause in her cloud, 

And the lark drop down at his feet. 

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, 

The snake slipt under a spray, 
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak, 

And stared with his foot on the prey, 
And the nightingale thought, ' I have sung many songs, 

But never a one so gay. 
For he sings of what the world will be 

When the years have died away.' 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 79 

IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 

EMMIE, 
I. 

Our doctor had call'd in another, I never had seen him 

before, 
But he sent a chill to my heart when I saw him come in at 

the door, 
Fresh from the surgery-schools of France and of other 

lands — 
Harsh red hair, big voice, big chest, big merciless hands ! 
Wonderful cures he had done, O yes, but they said too of 

him 
He ^yas happier using the knife than in trying to save the 

limb. 
And that I can well believe, for he look'd so coarse and so 

red, 
I could think he was one of those who would break their jests 

on the dead, 
And mangle the living dog that had loved him and fawn'd at 

his knee — 
Drench'd with the hellish oorali — that ever such things 

should be ! 10 

II. 

Here was a boy — I am sure that some of our children 

would die 
But for the voice of Love, and the smile, and the comforting 

eye — 
Here was a boy in the ward, every bone seem'd out of its 

place — 
Caught in a mill and crush'd — it was all but a hopeless 

case : 



8o IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 

And he handled him gently enough \ but his voice and his 

face were not kind, 
And it was but a hopeless case, he had seen it and made up 

his mind, 
And he said to me roughly, ' The lad will need little more of 

your care.' 
'All the more need,' I told him, 'to seek the Lord Jesus in 

prayer ; 
They are all his children here, and I pray for them all as my 

own : ' 
But he turn'd to me, 'Ay, good woman, can prayer set a 

broken bone ? ' 20 

Then he mutter'd half to himself, but I know that I heard 

him say 
' All very well — but the good Lord Jesus has had his day.' 

III.' 

Had? has it come? It has only dawn'd. It will come by 

and by. 
O how could I serve in the wards if the hope of the world 

were a lie? 
How could I bear with the sights and the loathsome smells of 

disease, 
But that He said ' Ye do it to me, when ye do it to these ' ? 

IV. 

So he went. And we past to this ward where the younger 

children are laid : 
Here is the cot of our orphan, our darling, our meek little 

maid ; 
Empty you see just now ! We have lost her who loved her 

so much — 
Patient of pain tho' as quick as a sensitive plant to the 

touch ; 30 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. \ 8 1 

Hers was the prettiest prattle, it often moved me to tears,\ 
Hers was the gratefullest heart I have found in a child of 

her years — \ 

Nay you remember our Emmie ; you used to send her the \ 

flowers ; 
How she would smile at 'em, play with 'em, talk to 'em hours 

after hours ! 
They that can wander at will where the works of the Lord 

are reveal'd 
Little guess what joy can be got from a cowslip out of the 

field ; 
Flowers to these ' spirits in prison ' are all they can know of 

the spring, 
They freshen and sweeten the wards like the waft of an 

angel's wing; 
And she lay with a flower in one hand and her thin hands 

crost on her breast — 
Wan, but as pretty as heart can desire, and we thought her at 

rest, -^^ 

Quietly sleeping — so quiet, our doctor said ' Poor little 

dear. 
Nurse, I must do it to-morrow ; she '11 never live thro' it, I 

fear.' 

V. 

I walk'd with our kindly old doctor as far as the head of 

the stair, 
Then I return'd to the ward; the child didn't see I was 

there. 

VI. 

Never since I was nurse, had I been so grieved and so vext ! 
Emmie had heard him. Softly she call'd from her cot to the 

next, 

6 



/ 

82 / IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 

' He says I shall never live thro' it, O Annie, what shall I 

do?' 
Annie consider'd. 'If 1/ said the wise little Annie, ' was 

you, 
I should cry to the dear Lord Jesus to help me, for, Emmie, 

you see. 
It 's all in the picture there : " Little children should come 

to me." ' 50 

(Meaning the print that you gave us, I find that it always can 

please 
Our children, the dear Lord Jesus with children about his 

knees.) 
' Yes, and I will,' said Emmie, ' but then if I call to the 

Lord, 
How should he know that it 's me ? such a lot of beds in the 

ward ! ' 
That was a puzzle for Annie. Again she consider'd and 

said : 
' Emmie, you put out your arms, and you leave 'em outside 

on the bed — 
The Lord has so mut:/i to see to ! but, Emmie, you tell it him 

plain. 
It 's the litde girl with her arms lying out on the counter- 
pane.' 

VII. 

I had sat three nights by the child — I could not watch her 

for four — 
My brain had begun to reel — I felt I could do it no more. 60 
That was my sleeping-night, but I thought that it never 

would pass. 
There was a thunder-clap once, and a clatter of hail on the 

glass, 
And there was a phantom cry that I heard as I tost about. 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 83 

The motherless bleat of a lamb in the storm and the dark- 
ness without ; 

My sleep was broken besides with dreams of the dreadful 
knife 

And fears for our delicate Emmie who scarce would escape 
with her life ; 

Then in the gray of the morning it seem'd she stood by me 
and smiled, 

And the doctor came at his hour, and we went to see to the 
child. 

VIII. 

He had brought his ghastly tools : we believed her asleep 
again — 

Her dear, long, lean, little arms lying out on the counter- 
pane ; 70 

Say that His day is done ! Ah why should we care what 
they say? 

The Lord of the children had heard her, and Emmie had 
past away. 




84 



LOVE AND DEATH. 



LOVE AND DEATH. 

What time the mighty moon was gathering light 

Love paced the thymy plots of Paradise, 

And all about him roU'd his lustrous eyes ; 

When, turning round a cassia, full in view. 

Death, walking all alone beneath a yew. 

And talking to himself, first met his sight : 

' You must begone,' said Death, ' these walks are mine.' 

Love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight ; 

Yet ere he parted said, ' This hour is thine : 

Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree i 

Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath, 

So in the light of great eternity 

Life eminent creates the shade of death ; 

The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, 

But I shall reign for ever over all.' 




NOTES. 



ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES. 

Cf. (con/er), compare. 
C. T., Chaucer's Ca7iterbjiry Tales. 
F. Q., Spenser's Faerie Qiteene. 
Fol., following. 
Id. {idem), the same. 

Imp. Diet., Ogilvie's hnperial Dictionary (Century Co.'s ed., New York, 1883). 
Palgrave, Lyrical Poems by Lord Tennyson, edited by F. T. Palgrave (London, 
.8S5). 

P. L., Milton's Paradise Lost. 

Select Poems, Rolfe's ed. of Select Poems of Tennyson, 1885. 

Tainsh, Mr. E. C. Tainsh's Study of the Works of Alfred Te7tnyson (London, 



The abbreviations of the names of Shakespeare's plays will be readily understood. 
The line-numbers are those of the "Globe" edition. 



NOTES. 



v;rf 



7 f 








TENNYSON AND HIS WORKS. 

Alfred Tennyson, the third of seven brothers (there were also five 
sisters), was born on the 6th of August, 1809, at Somersby, a village in 
Lincolnshire containing at that time less than a hundred inhabitants. 
His father, Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, LL.D., was the rector of 
the parish, " a man of energetic character, remarkable for his great 
strength and stature, and of very various talents, — something of a poet, 
painter, architect, and musician, and also a considerable linguist and 
mathematician." Mrs. Tennyson, whose maiden name was Elizabeth 
Fytche, was the daughter of a clergyman, and is described as "a sweet 
and gentle and most imaginative woman ; so kind-hearted that it had 
passed into a proverb, and the wicked inhabitants of a neighboring 
village used to bring their dogs to her windows and beat them in order 
to be bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or to make advantageous 
bargains by selling her the worthless ci)rs."i 

In those days Somersby was quite out of the world, — so much so 
that the news of the battle of Waterloo did not reach it at the time, — 
but the Tennyson children had a world of their own with its mimic 
history and romance. "The boys," says Mrs. Ritchie, "played great 
games, like Arthur's knights ; they were champions and warriors de- 
fending a stone heap ; or, again, they would set up opposing camps with 
a king in the midst of each. The king was a willow wand stuck into 



1 Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, in an article on "Alfred Tennyson" in Harper's 
Magazine for December, 1883, to which we are indebted for some interesting particu- 
lars of the poet's early life. 



8S NOTES. 

the ground, with an outer circle of immortals to defend him of firmer, 
stiffer sticks. Then each party would come with stones, hurling at 
each other's king, and trying to overthrow him. Perhaps as the day 
wore on they became romancers, leaving the jousts deserted. When 
dinner-time came, and they all sat round the table, each in turn put a 
chapter of his history underneath the potato-bowl, — long endless his- 
tories, chapter after chapter, diffuse, absorbing, unending, as are the 
stories of real life of which each sunrise opens on a new part. Some of 
these romances were in letters, like ' Clarissa Harlowe.' Alfred used 
to tell a story which lasted for months, and which was called 'The Old 
Horse.' " 

Earlier even than this the boy had begun to " lisp in numbers." When 
he was only five years old, he exclaimed as the wind swept through the 
rectory garden, "I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind." Mrs. 
Ritchie tells how, not long afterwards, he first put his baby poetry into 
writing. "Alfred's first verses were written upon a slate which his 
brother Charles put into his hand one Sunday at Louth, when all the 
elders of the party were going into church, and the child was left alone. 
Charles gave him a subject, — the flowers in the garden, — and when he 
came back from church, little Alfred brought the slate to his brother, 
all covered with written lines of blank verse. They were made on the 
model of Thomson's ' Seasons,' the only poetry he had ever read. One 
can picture it all to one's self, the flowers in the garden, the verses, the 
little poet with waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning the lines. 
' Yes, you can write,' said Charles, and he gave Alfred back the slate. 
I have also heard another story, of his grandfather, later on, asking him 
to write an elegy on his grandmother, who had recently died, and, when 
it was written, putting ten shillings into his hands and saying, ' There, 
that is the first money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take 
my word for it, it will be the last.' " 

Alfred and Charles, who was a little more than a year the elder, were 
sent together to Louth gramm:ir school ; and there, in the early part 
of 1827, we find them preparing for the press a collection of juvenile 
poems written from the age of fifteen upwards. It was published that 
spring by the Messrs. Jackson, booksellers and printers in Louth, who 
paid the boys ten pounds for the copyright. The volume was entitled 
Poems bv Two Brothers, with the addition of the modest motto from Mar- 
tial, *' Haec nos novimus esse nihil" (We ourselves know that these are 
nothing). The pieces, one hundred and two in number, aside from their 
interest as including the first printed verses of one who has since risen 
to the highest position as a poet, are worthy of note for their wide range 
of subjects and the extensive reading in classical and modern authors 
which they indicate. The themes are drawn from all ages and all lands, 
as a few of the titles may serve to show : Antony to Cleopatra ; The 
Gondola ; Written by an Exile of Bassorah, sailing down the Euphrates ; 
Persia; Egypt; The Druid's Prophecies; Swiss Song; The Expedi- 
tion of Nadir Shah into Hindostan ; Greece; The Klaid of Savoy; 
Scotch Song; God's Denunciations against Pharaoh-Hophra ; The 
Death of Lord Byron; The Fall of Jerusalem; Eulogium on Homer; 



TEiYNYSON A.VD HIS WORKS. 89 

The Scenery of South America; Babylon ; Phrenology; Exhortation to 
the Greeks ; King Charles's Vision, etc. The poems are often introduced 
by quotations; among others, from Addison, Byron, Cicero, Claudian, 
Gray, Horace, Hume, Lucretius, Milton, Moore, Ovid, Racine, Rous- 
seau, Sallust, Scott, Tacitus, Terence, and Virgil. There are also fre- 
quent foot-notes, which are more learned than we should expect from 
boys of eighteen, and yet Without the affectation of scholarship that 
we might expect in connection with such a juvenile display of erudition. 
The brief preface to the volume is withal very modest and manly. 

Charles, who was associated with Alfred in this precocious poetical 
venture, afterwards took the name of Turner on inheriting certain 
estates from his grandmother. He was a true poet, as his later pub- 
lished works amply prove. It may be mentioned incidentally here that 
most, if not all, of the seven Tennyson brothers have written poetry. 

Some of the critics have exercised their ingenuity in trying to pick out 
Alfred's work from the poems in this early anonymous volume ; but the 
most that they appear to have accomplished has been to point out a few 
verbal resemblances, which may be merely accidental coincidences, be- 
tween some of the juvenile pieces and certain acknowledged produc- 
tions of Tennyson. 

We may see in these boyish verses of the two brothers the influence 
of Byron, who is quoted no less than six times, and whose recent death 
forms the subject of one poem while it is referred to in another. Alfred 
was not yet fifteen when the news of that event reached the little village 
in Lincolnshire. " Byron was dead ! I thought the whole world was at 
an end," he once said, recalling those early days ; "I thought every- 
thing was over and finished for every one — that nothing else mattered. 
I remember I walked out alone, and carved 'Byron is dead' into the 
sandstone." 

In 1828, Charles and Alfred Tennyson went to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, where their elder brother Frederick had just won the prize for 
a Greek poem. Here Alfred made the friendship of not a few young 
men who were destined, like himself, to gain a name in literature, — 
among them Trench, Monckton Milnes, James Spedding, Henry Alford, 
W. H. Brookfield, J. M. Kemble, and Kinglake. More gifted than all 
the rest, but prevented by his early death ( in his twenty-third year) 
from showing anything more than the budding promise of his powers, 
was Arthur Hall am, to whom the poet's /;/ Memoriam will be an im- 
mortal monument. " It has pleased God that in his death, as well as in 
his life and nature, he should be marked beyond ordinary men." 

The Lovey^s Tale, though not published until a few years ago, was 
written the same year that Tennyson went to Cambridge ; and the next 
summer he gained the Chancellor's gold medal for a poem on Timbuc- 
too — the first instance in which that honor had been awarded to a piece 
in blank verse. The Atheiiceum of July 22, 1829, in a highly eulogistic 
notice, remarked : " These productions have often been ingenious and 
elegant, but we have never before seen one of them which indicated 
really first-rate poetical genius, and which could have done honor to 
any man that ever wrote." 



90 NOTES. 

In 1830, Tennyson brought out, under his own name, Poems ^ chiefly 
Lyrical^ — a volume of 154 pages, containing fifty-three pieces, twenty- 
five of which were suppressed in subsequent editions, though several of 
these have been since restored. 

This collection, published when the poet was only twenty-one, in- 
cluded Lilian, Isabel, The Meruiaid, The Merman, The Owl, Recollec- 
tions of the Arabian Nights, Ode to Memory, The Poefs Mind, and The 
Poet. The last-named piece is of special interest as indicating the high 
ideal of the poet's art and vocation with which the young singer started 
on his career. It received just recognition and praise in a notice of the 
book that appeared in the Westminster Review for January, 1831. The 
conclusion of the passage, which reads now like a prophecy fulfilled, 
was as follows : 

" He has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just con- 
ception of the grandeur of a poet's destiny ; and we look to him for its 
fulfilment. It is not for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for 
the amusement of themselves or others. They can influence the asso- 
ciations of unnumbered minds ; they can command the sympathies of 
unnumbered hearts ; they can disseminate principles, they can give those 
principles power over men's imaginations ; they can excite in a good 
cause the sustained enthusiasm that is sure to conquer ; they can blast 
the laurels of the tyrants, and hallow the memories of the martyrs of 
patriotism ; they can act with a force, the extent of which it is difficult 
to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently 
upon national happiness. If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, 
he too is a poet ; and many years hence may he read his juvenile descrip- 
tion of that character with 'the proud consciousness that it has become 
the description and history of his own work." 

Fifty-five years have passed since these eloquent and prophetic words 
were penned ; and there could not be a more truthful description and 
history of Tennyson's work than those inspired strains of his youth. 
The estimate of the critic was correct. The young singer was a poet, 
and he has proved himself such a poet as he saw in that immortal 
vision. It was a lofty and noble ideal, but he has made it a living 
reality. 

Tennyson's book was also reviewed favorably by Leigh Hunt in The 
Taller for 1831, and by Arthur Hallam in The Englishman'' s Magazine 
for August of the same year. In May, 1832, Christopher North (Pro- 
fessor Wilson) criticised the young poet's work in Blackwood \\\ a very 
different vein, praising it indeed, but showing up its faults and defects 
with merciless severity. There was justice in some of its strictures, 
and they may have had their influence in leading Tennyson to suppress 
certain of the poems in later editions. At any rate, the passages held 
up to ridicule by the reviewer are mostly from these suppressed pieces. 

In the winter of 1832, Tennyson published another thin volume of 
verse, which was a great advance on that of two years previous, con- 
taining as it did some of the poems which have ever since been reckoned 
among his best, — as The Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, CEnone, 
The Palace of Art, The Lotos-Eaters, and the Dream of Fair Women. It is 



TENNYSON AND HIS WORKS. 9 1 

true that every one of these poems has been more or less revised since 
then ; but a careful comparison of the earlier and later versions shows that 
much that we should now mark as most admirable in them is unchanged 
from the reading of 1832. A considerable portion of this volume, 
though less than of the former one, has been suppressed in the more 
recent editions ; but a few of the omitted pieces have since been re- 
stored under the head of "Juvenilia." The following little hit at 
Christopher North has ;/^/ been thus reinstated: 

" You did late review my lays, 

Crusty Christopher ; 
You did mingle blame and praise, 

Rusty Christopher. 
When I learnt from whom it came, 
I forgave you all the blame, 

Musty Christopher ; 
I could not forgive the praise, 

Fusty Christopher." 

For the next ten years (1833-1842) Tennyson published almost noth- 
ing. The Lover''s Tale was printed in 1833, but withdrawn before pub- 
lication and not brought out again until 1879, after a pirated edition had 
appeared. St. Agnes and one or two other pieces were contributed to 
" Annuals " and similar collections during this period ; but with these 
slight exceptions the silence of the poet was unbroken for the ten years. 

It is probable that this long silence was mainly due to the death of 
his friend Hallam in 1833 ; perhaps also, as has been suggested by more 
than one critic, to his desire to perfect himself in his art before giving 
the world further results of it. In ]\Ievioriam was elaborated during 
this period, though not published until 1850 ; and the best of the poems 
issued in 1830 and 1832 were carefully revised — some of them almost 
entirely rewritten — and sundry new poems were produced. 

The fruits of this labor {In Memoriain excepted) appeared in 1842 in 
two volumes, one of which was chiefly made up of the earlier poems in 
their revised form, while the other was almost entirely new. Among the 
contents of the latter volume was the Alorte cV Arthur, which we know, 
from a reference to it in one of Landor's letters, to have been written as 
early as 1837, and which, like The Lady of Shalott in the 1832 volume, 
shows that the Arthurian legends had begun to interest and inspire the 
poet long before he planned the extended epical treatment of them in 
the Idyls of the King. 

The Talkifig Oak, Dora, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, St. Agnes, and Sir Gala- 
had are among the other remarkable poems published in 1842. 

The general recognition of Tennyson as the greatest poet of the time 
dates from this period. Hitherto his admirers had been the select few, 
and the leading critics had been divided in their estimate of his W'Ork ; 
but now he was hailed with almost unanimous eulogies. As another 
has said, " all England rang with the stirring music of Locksley Hall," 
and " nearly all of the choicer spirits of the age conspired to chant the 
praises of the poet and to do him honor." 

Up to this time Tennyson was almost unknown in this country. It 
is doubtful whether a dozen copies of the volumes of 1830 and 1832 



92 NOTES. 

ever crossed the Atlantic. Neither of them is to be found in any of our 
great libraries, and in private collections they are excessively rare. The 
only extended notice of them in any of our literary journals of that day, 
so far as we can learn, was in the Christian Examiner in 1833, from the 
pen of Mr. John S. D wight. He borrowed the books, as he informs 
us, of Emerson, who delighted to loan them to his friends and endeav- 
ored to have them reprinted in Boston.^ 

The edition of 1842 was reprinted here; but Mr. B. H. Ticknor, the 
son of the publisher, informs us that 1,500 copies supplied the Ameri- 
can demand for the next three years. 

By this time, his fame in England was well assured. Wordsworth, 
in a letter dated July i, 1845, says : " I saw Tennyson when I was in 
London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, 
and I hope will live to give the world still better things." It is a sig- 
nificant fact that, on the death of Southey in 1843, Tennyson was among 
the few poets who were talked of as successors to the laureateship, 
though the general opinion, as might have been expected, was in favor 
of the venerable poet on whom the honor was finally conferred. 

A second edition of the Poems of 1842 was called for within a year, 
and two more editions were issued in 1845 ^'^^^ 1846. In 1845 ^^^ '^otX. 
was placed on the pension-list by Sir Robert Peel for an annuity of 
;^2oo. The grant was the means of calling forth some ill-natured criti- 
cisms, the most notable of which was the following in Bulwer Lytton's 
New Timon, published in 1846: 

" Not mine, not mine (O muse forbid) the boon 
Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune, 
Tlie jingling medley of purloined conceits, 
Out-babying Wordsworth and out-glittering Keats ; 
Where all the arts of patchwork pastoral chime 
To drown the ears in Tennysonian rhyme ! 

Let school-miss Alfred vent her chaste delight , 
On 'darling little rooms, so warm and bright,' 
Chant ' I 'm aweary ' in infectious strain. 
And catch her ' blue-fly singing 1' the pane ' ; 
Though praised by critics and adored by Blues, 
Though Peel with pudding plump the puling muse, 
Thougli Theban taste the Saxon purse controls. 
And pensions Tennyson while starves a Knowles, 
Rather be thou, my poor Pierian maid. 
Decent at last, in Hayley's w^eeds arrayed. 
Than patch with frippery every tinsel line, 
And flaunt, admired, the Rag Fair of the Nine." 

The attack drew from Tennyson a rejoinder printed in Punch, February 
18, 1846, over the signature of " Alcibiades," and followed in the next 
number by another, less severe, entitled Afterthought. In the former, 
Lytton is characterized as " The padded man that wears the stays " — 

" Who killed the girls and thrilled the boys 
With dandy pathos when you wrote." 

* This we learn from Mr. Samuel Longfellow, who has shown us a letter from Messrs. 
C. C. Little & Co. to his brother the poet, dated April 27, 1838, in which they refer to 
Emerson's desire for an American reprint of Tennyson and their intention of making 
one. Why the plan was not carried out we are unable to say. 



TENNYSON AND HIS WORKS. 93 

The severest stanza is perhaps this : 

" Wliat profits now to understand 
The merits of a spotless shirt — 
A dapper boot — a little hand — 
If half the little soul is dirt?" 

The second poem in Punch has been lately included in the editions of 
Tennyson under the title of Literacy Squabbles. No one would suspect 
any reference to Lytton in it if he did not know its history ; and the 
conclusion to which the poet comes — that silence is "the noblest an- 
swer " to all such spiteful attacks — is one to which he might well have 
come earlier. 

It is pleasant to be able to add that Bulwer struck out the sneer at 
Tennyson from the third edition of The Nczo Timon, and that the two 
poets afterwards became good friends. In a public speech in 1862, 
Lytton, in alluding to Prince Albert, quoted what he called "the thought 
so exquisitely expressed by our Poet Laureate" — namely, that the 
Prince is "The silent father of our kings to be"; and later 'Tennyson, 
in dedicating i^^zrc-A/ to the younger Lytton, gracefully acknowledged his 
indebtedness to the novel on the same subject by the elder Lytton. 
'* O strange hate-healer, Time ! " as the Laureate elsewhere exclaims. 

On the more recent history of the poet it is not necessary to dwell in 
detail. In 1847 The Princess appeared, and in 1850 /;/ Memoriam was 
at last given to the world. The same year Tennyson was married, and 
was made Poet Laureate. In 1852 the Ode on the Death of Wellington 
was published, and the next year the eighth edition of the complete 
Poems was issued. Maiid and other Poems appeared in 1855, and a sec- 
ond edition in 1856 with Maud in a considerably enlarged form. In 
1859 followed the Idyls of the King, including Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and 
Guinrjcre. Ten thousand copies of the volume were sold in a few 
weeks. Four more Idyls — The Coining of Arthur, The Holy Grail, 
Pelleas and Ettarre, and The Passing of Arthur (in which the Morte 
d'Arth7(r of 1842 was incorporated) — were published ten years later, in 
1869, when forty thousand copies of the book were ordered in advance. 
The Last Toiwnament and Gareth and Lynette were added in 1872. 
Meanwhile Enoch Arden, etc., had appeared in 1864, and The Window 
had been privately printed in 1867. Sundry poems had also been con- 
tributed to magazines, and were included in The Holy Grail and other 
Poems of 1869. In 1875 ^^""^ drama of Queen Mary was given to the world, 
and in 1877 that oi Harold. The former, in a condensed and altered 
form, was put on the stage in 1876 with moderate success, but the lat- 
ter has never been acted. In 1879, ^s already stated, The Lover'' s Tale, 
withdrawn in 1833, was published, with the addition of a third part 
entitled The Golden Supper. Later in the same year. The Falcon, a one- 
act play based on the well-known story of Count Federigo and Monna 
Giovanna frotn Boccaccio that had been already told in verse by Barry 
Cornwall and Longfellow, was produced at the St. James Theatre in 
London. In the Ballads and other Poems of 1880 sundry pieces con- 
tributed to the Nineteenth Century in 1877-1879 were gathered up, with 
others that had not been previously printed. Early in 1881, The Cup, 



94 NOTES. 

a tragedy in two acts, was brought out at the Lyceum Theatre, under 
the direction of Mr. Irving, and had a very successful run. In Novem- 
ber, 1882, a fourth drama by Tennyson was acted in London — a prose 
work called The Protnise of May. 

Late in 1S83 it was announced that the Queen had offered a peerage 
to Tennyson, and that he had accepted it. He was gazetted Baron of 
Aid worth and Farringford, on the iSth of January, 1SS4. Among the 
letters he received on the occasion was one from an old woman named 
Susan Epton, who had been in the service of the poet's father and after- 
wards lady's maid to Mrs. Tennyson. " I have received many letters of 
congratulation," Tennyson remarked in a letter to a friend, "some from 
great lords and ladies; but the affectionate remembrance of good old 
Susan Epton and her sister touched me more than all these." 

Early in 1SS5 Lord Tennyson published the drama of Beckef, and 
at the close of the same year the volume entitled Tiresias and other 
Foejns, the larger portion of which had not previously appeared in 
print. 



THE DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR. 

This poem was first printed in the volume published in the winter 
of 1832 (dated 1833). The only alterations since made in it are the slight 
ones in lines i and 41 noted below. 

The piece is an example of sustained personification, that figure of 
rhetoric by which "life is ascribed to inanimate objects or reason to 
irrational creatures." The closing year is described as a dying old 
man, while the new year is his "son and heir." 

I. The Tvinters snmv. The original reading was " the winter-snow." 

5. A-dying. This old prefix a- or an- (as in ^Matt. iv. 2 : " an hungred ") 
is only another form of on ; and in some instances the two forms remain 
in use side by side, as in aboard and on board, afoot and on foot, etc. 
Sometimes one or the other is obsolete. Thus we still have asleep, but 
not on sleep, which is found in Acts, xiii. 36; on high, but not a-high, as 
in Shakespeare's Rich. III. iv. 4. 86 : " One heav'd a-high to be hurl'd 
down below," etc. In a-dying the dying is a verbal noun (like the 
Latin gerund), not the participle. A-dying is thus equivalent to on or 
in dying. These forms are now rarely used except, as here, in poetry 
or in imitations of antiquated English. 

6. Old year, yon must not die. Here the personified year is ad- 
dressed — an example of the rhetorical figure called apostrophe. 

19. He fi-oth^d his bumpers to the brim. His cup of joy was filled to 
overflowing; or, as the next line says, there could not be a merrier 
year. 

29. Quips. Sharp jests or sarcasms. Old John Lyly, in his play of 
Alexander and Campaspe (iii. 2), explains a quip as "a short saying 
of a sharp wit, with a bitter sense in a sweet word." We find the 
verb (= sneer at, taunt) in Spenser's Faerie Queene, vi. 7. 44: 



THE BLACKBIRD. 95 

" and stil], when she complains, 
The more he laughs, and does her closely quip, 
To see her sore lament and bite her tender lip." 

32. Before. That is, before he arrives. 

41. Twelve o'clock. The original reading is " 07ie o'clock " — a curious 
slip. Of course the poet knew that the year ends at midnight; but for 
the moment he seems to have thought of o?ie o'clock as the beginning 
instead of the end of the Jirst Jiour in the new year. 

43. Rite for you. Mourn for you. For the intransitive use, cf. 
Shakespeare, K. John, v. 7. 117 : 

" Nought shall make us rue, 
If England to herself do rest but true." 

46. His face is growing sharp and thin. In The Lady of Shalott the 
first reading of lines 147, 148 was : 

" Till her eyes were darkened wholly 
And her smooth face sharpened slowly." 

and Mrs. Kemble, commenting upon it, says : " In the fourth stanza the 
true and terrible process — 'And her smooth face sharpened slowly' — 
with which whoever has looked on death is awfully acquainted, is dis- 
carded for ' Till her blood was frozen slowly.' An equally common 
effect of death, no doubt, but, being an invisible one, by no means as pic- 
turesque or striking as the statue-like fineness and rigidity which the fea- 
tures of the dead assume, lying for a while, both in form and color, like 
their own monuments, finely wrought in fine material — all the coarse- 
ness of life having departed with life, almost in some instances it should 
seem with the spirit whose withdrawal leaves the mortal frame more 
beautiful to look upon than while it held its disturbed and struggling 
tenant." 

THE BLACKBIRD. 

This poem was published in 1842, but we infer from a note in the 
first volume of that edition that it was written as early as 1833. 

The poem is an apostrophe (see on The Old Year, 6 above) to the bird, 
which is personified, or regarded as a rational creature, capable of 
understanding what is addressed to it. 

The blackbird oi the poem, it should be understood, is not the Ameri- 
can bird known by that name, but a species of thrush (the Turdns 
ine7-ula of some naturalists, the Mei'ula vulgaris of others), common in 
all parts of the British Isles and throughout Europe. The plumage of 
the full-grown male is of a deep black, the bill and orbits of the eyes 
being yellow; the female and the young are of a rusty brown, with dusky 
bill and eyelids. Its fondness for fruit makes it annoying to the gar- 
dener, but it also befriends him by destroying insects and their larvae. 
It is a good singer, and is often kept as a cage-bird. 

5. Espaliers. A kind of trellis-work to which fruit-trees are trained 
and fastened in order to expose their branches more fully to the sun. 
Standards are trees that stand without any such support. 



96 NOTES. 

7. The minettcd black-hearts. The "black-heart" cherries with no 
net over them to protect them from the birds. 

9. Yet, tho" I spared thee all the spriiii^. The first reading was " Yet 
tho' I spared thee kith and kin," with "jennetin" below. 

11. That gold dagger of thy hill. A form of the simile, or direct com- 
parison of one thing to another. The yellow bill of the bird is like a 
golden dagger with which he pierces the fruit. 

12. Jenneting. A kind of early apple. The origin of the name is 
unknown. It is not a corruption of Jnne-eating, as some have supposed. 
The fruit is mentioned by Bacon in Essay ^j [Of Gardens) as coming in 
July. He spells \t ginniting. 

13. The silver tongue. Musical sounds are often compared to those 
produced by silver bells. Cf. Shakespeare, Romeo and Jnliet, ii. 2. 166 : 
" How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night ! " In the same play, 
iv. 5, Peter and the Musicians discuss the figurative expression thus: 

^^ Peter. Then have at you, with my wit ! . . . Answer me like men : 
' When griping grief the heart doth wound, 
And doleful dumps ihe mind oppress, 
Then music with her silver sound ' — 

whv 'silver sound'? why 'music with her silver sound'? What say you, Simon 
Catling ? 

First Music tail. Marry, sir, because silver hath a sweet sound. 

Peter. Pretty! What say you, Hugh Rebeck? 

Second Musician. I say ' silver sound ' because musicians sound for silver. 

Peter. Pietty too ! What say you, James Soundpost? 

TJiird Musician. Faith, I know not what to say. 
_ Peter. O, I cry you mercy ; you are the singer : I will say for you. It is ' music 
with her silver sound' because musicians have no gold for sounding." 

14. Cold February loved. That is, which February loved. This 
omission of the relative is a common ellipsis in poetry. February is 
personified. 

17. And in the sidtry garden-squares. The 1842 reading was " I bet- 
ter brook the drawling stares;" and in 19, "Not hearing thee at all," 
etc. 

20. As wJien a haivker hazvks his wares. Like a peddler crying his 
goods. We have here one of the ordinary forms of the simile. See 
on II above. 

22. Prospers. That is, shines bright and warm. Here we have a 
metaphor — an indirect or implied comparison. Prosperity is often 
compared to sunshine, and so sunshine may be likened to prosperity. 

24. The frozen palms of spring. A poetical expression for the chilly 
days of early spring. Spring is personified, and frozen palms is a 
metaphor used in carrying out the personification. 



THE MERMAN. 

This poem, with the companion piece that follows, was first printed 
in the volume of 1830. It needs little explanation or comment. 

13. Sea-flower. Perhaps the sea-anemone, which, though an animal, 



THE MERMAID— THE MAY QUEEN. 97 

gets its name from the resemblance of its outspread tentacles to the 
petals of a flower. 

32. Tnrkis. The turqiioise, tiirkois, or ttirkis, is a blue precious stone, 
found in the mountains of Persia and originally brought into Western 
Europe by way of Turkey, whence it gets its name. 

Almoiidine, or abnandine, is a beautiful variety of garnet, first brought 
from Alabanda, a city of Asia Minor. The name is a corruption of the 
Latin alabandina. 

THE MERMAID. 

4. Combing her hair. A favorite occupation of the mermaids, ac- 
cording to all the stories and legends. 

15. Adown. The earlier form of which fl'^zw^ is a corruption ; used 
both as adverb and preposition. Cf. 39 below. 

36. Sea-wolds. The Imp. Diet, defines the word as "sea wood or 
forest, vegetation under the sea resembling a forest," and quotes this 
passage ; but 7vold is probably used in the other sense of " an open 
country," as in the lines To J. S. 2 : 

" The wind that beats the mountain blows 
More softly round the open wold." 

Elsewhere, Tennyson uses it in the sense of "a low hill," as in The 
Miller'' s Daughter, 105 : " And oft in ramblings on the wold; " Id. in : 
" From off the wold I came," etc. See also May Queen, 71. 

45. Carry me. That is, carry me off, gain my hand ; a sense not 
given in the dictionaries. Cf. Goldsmith's Song: 

"Ah me ! when shall I marry me? 

Lovers are plenty, but fail to relieve me; 
He, fond youth, that could carry me, 
Offers to love, but means to deceive me." 

48. Pied. Parti-colored, variegated. Cf. Milton, H Allegro, 75 : 
" Meadows trim with daisies pied," etc. 

Be. Are ; as often in old writers. Cf. Shakespeare, Ha7?ilet, iii. 2. 
32 : " O, there be players that I have seen play," etc. 



THE MAY QUEEN. 

The first and second divisions of this poem were printed in 1832 ; 
the " Conclusion " was added in 1842, but appears to have been written 
in 1833. 

I. You must tvake and call me early. Tainsh (p. 44) says : " I cannot 
refrain from here setting down a dainty morsel of appreciative criticism 
upon The May Queen, offered by a young girl friend of mine. In the 
first part of the poem, the child, in her high-spirited, half-wayward 
mood, says, 'You must wake and call me early'; but when illness has 
taken her, and the approach of death makes her meek, her words 
change to, ' If you 're waking call me early.' 

7 



98 NOTES. 

"Apropos of my girl-friend's criticism and of a certain aspect of criti- 
cism in general, I should be told by many, * Yes, that is all very well 
and very pretty, but it is a difference that the poet did not intend, and 
did not see. The detection of such shades of meaning is generally 
more ingenious than true. Not only Shakespeare but every poet is 
made, by his lovers and commentators, to mean much more than ever 
entered his own mind.' This general statement has of course much 
truth in it ; but the truth is only of a corrective sort. There is much 
truth on the other side, too. The minute and loving study of a poet 
may result in the invention for him of meanings that he never had ; 
but, much more, it will result in the discovery of meanings that he did 
have. The superficial student does not less plant false meanings upon 
his author; and //^, for certain, misses all the deeper meanings. And 
there is another side to the matter, which can best be appreciated by 
taking up the special morsel of criticism that led to this digression. I 
would say to the supposed objector, ' Do you grant that these two 
forms of expression are natural to the two states of mind in which the 
May Queen child is pictured ? Then the poet viay have intended the 
coincidence of feeling and expression ? But, if not, do you speak to a 
happy man and a sad one, to a man and a woman, to a person who 
suits you and one who does not, to a grown person and a child, in the 
same tone and under the same forms of speech } Do you, by deliberate 
intention, vary your tone and forms of speech in these cases t If you 
do, you are mouthing ; but if you are a perfectly natural and simple 
person, you do not, as you know. Yet are not your various forms of 
speech the proper expression of your various states of mind and feeling, 
and would not the observation of the coincidence between these varia- 
tions be an observation of a radically natural and not of an accidental 
coincidence ? Finally, are not you, in a deep sense, though not con- 
sciously, the author of this adaptation of expression to sentiment .'' ' So 
it is with the poet. It is true that he does not stand outside his char- 
acters and deliberately and mechanically adapt the outer to the inner — 
expression to feeling. Instead, he lives in his characters — for the time 
being becomes his characters — thinks their thoughts, feels their feelings, 
and expresses himself with their expression ; and therefore as, in a 
sensitive nature, every varying shade of thought and feeling is matched 
by some corresponding touch of change in the manifestation, the changes 
themselves, much more their coincidence, being half unknown to their 
subject; so, in the poet's characters, the adaptation of expression to 
sentiment will be perfect, not by accident, nor by design, but by nature, 
because the poet and his character have, for the time being, become 
one. And the detection of these shades of coincidence is the discovery, 
not of his accidents, nor of his art, but of his poethood ; and though he 
should be unaware of the touches of nature that had surprised and re- 
joiced you, none the less they might be the fruit and the soul of his 
genius." 

2. The i^lad New-year. The first reading was " the blythe New-year." 

3. Maddest merriest. Note the alliteration, or succession of words 
beginning with the same sound. Cf. 29, etc., below. 



THE MAY QUEEN. 99 

5. Black black. Such repetitions are common in the old ballad poetry, 
of which this poem is in a way an imitation. Cf. 66, etc., below. 

13. Think ye. In the ed. of 1832 ye is generally used as both sub- 
ject and object (as in 48, 70, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, etc., below), 
but it has since been changed to you except in this line. 

14. Robi)i. The reading of 1832, changed to " Robert" in 1842, but 
restored in the more recent eds. 

30. Cuckoo-flaivers. A wild flower, the Cardamine pratejisis, found in 
this country as in England. 

31. Marsh-marigold. A common plant {Caltha faliisiris) with large 
yellow flowers, growing wild in marshy places in England and in the 
Northern United States. 

34. The happy stars. Note the " sympathetic " epithet, the stars be- 
ing represented as sharing the human enjoyment of nature. Cf. 39 
just below, etc. 

45. If you ''re tvaking, etc. See on i above. 

52. The blossom on. The original reading was "the may upon" — 
that is, the white blossoms of the blackthorn, or sloe [Prunns spinosa). 
Elsewhere Tennyson uses may of the white hawthorn blossoms; as in 
The Miller^ s Daughter, 130: "The lanes, you know, were white with 
may." See Select Poems, p. 157. 

56. Charles's Wain. The constellation of the Great Bear, or the 
" Great Dipper," as it is called in this country. Cf. Shakespeare, 
I Henry IV. ii. I. 2: "Charles' Wain is over the new chimney, and 
yet our horse not packed." Charles' is said to be a corruption of 
chorle's or churVs (= countryman's). For churl in this sense, cf. Shake- 
speare's Comedy of Errors, iii. i. 24: "Good meat, sir, is common ; 
that every churl affords " ; that is, even a peasant can afford it. 

65. The chancel-casement. The window in the chancel of the neigh- 
boring church. 

For grave of mine the early reading was " grave o' mine." 

71. Wold. See on The Mermaid, 36, above. 

72. Oat-grass. " The common name of several British grasses, mostly, 
but not always, of the genus Avena " {Imp. Diet.). 

Sword-grass. " A general name for sedgy plants, on account of their 
sword-shaped leaves " {Id.). 

77. And forgive me ci-e I go. The original reading was "upon my 
cheek and brow " ; and " ye " lox you throughout the stanza. See on 13 
above. 

92. The box of mignonette. Cf. The Miller's Daughter, 81 : 

" For you remember, you had set, 

That morning, on the casement-edge, 
A long green box of mignonette," etc. 

93. Before the day is born. The early reading was "when it begins to 
dawn " ; doubtless changed for the sake of the rhyme. 

107, 108. But still I think, etc. The two lines were originally as 
follows : 

" But still it can't be long, mother, before I find release ; 
And that good man, the clergyman, he preaches words of peace." 



NOTES. 

shozd'd. In the first reading these words were 
transposed. 

114. My lamp. For the allusion, see Matt. xxv. 

117. Death-7vatch. A small beetle (the Anobium tessellattuu) whose 
"ticking" is supposed by superstitious and ignorant people to prognos- 
ticate death. To produce the sound the animal raises itself on its hind 
legs and beats its head forcibly against what it stands upon. The tick- 
ing is said to be the call of the male insect to its mate, and, if not an- 
swered, to be repeated in another place. The number of successive 
strokes is usually from seven to eleven. Dean Swift gives the following 
fanciful description of the creature : — 

" A wood worm 
That lies in old wood, like a hare in her form, 
With teeth or with claws it will bite or will scratch. 
And chambermaids christen this worm a death-watch, 
Because, like a watcii, it always cries click : 
Then woe be to those in the house who are sick ; 
For as sure as a gun they will give up the ghost. 
If the maggot cries click when it scratches the post. 
But a kettle of scalding hot water injected. 
Infallibly cures the timber affected ; 
The omen is broken, the danger is over. 
The maggot will die, and the sick will recover." 

It is a very old superstition that the hozvling of dogs by night is a pre- 
sage of death to sick persons in the neighborhood. Alexander Ross, in 
his Appendix to Arcana Microcosmi, 1652 (quoted by Brand in his 
Popular Antiquities), says : "That dogs by their howling portend death 
and calamities is plaine by historic and experience. Julius Obsequens 
(c. 122) showeth that there was an extraordinary howling of dogs before 
the sedition in Rome about the dictatorship of Pompey ; he showeth 
also (c. 127) that before the civil wars between Augustus and Antonius, 
among many other prodigies, there was great howling of dogs near the 
house of Lepidus the Pontifice. Camerarius tells us (c. 73) that some 
Gennan princes have certain tokens and peculiar presages of their 
deaths ; amongst others are the howling of dogs. Capitolinus tells us 
that the dogs by their howling presaged the death of Maximinus. Pau- 
sanias (in Messe) relates that before the destruction of the Messenians 
the dogs broke out into a more fierce howling than ordinary; and we 
read in Fincelius that, in the year 1553, some weeks before the over 
throw of the Saxons, the dogs in Mysinia flocked together, and used 
strange bowlings in the woods and fields. The like howling is observed 
by Virgil, presaging the Roman calamities in the Pharsalick war : 

' Obscoenique canes, importunaeque volucres 
Signa dabant.' 

So Lucan to the same purpose : ' Flebile saevi latravere canes ' ; and 
Statius : * Nocturnique canum gemitus.' " 

123. To roll. Referring to the deep prolonged sound of the wind. 
Cf. Morte d'' Arthur, i : "So all day long the noise of battle roll'd," etc. 

134. Cojue. The early eds. have "comes." It is a matter of popular 
belief that an omen thrice repeated will prove true. 

142. Many a worthier. The early eds. have " many worthier." 



THE DESERTED HOUSE — DORA— GODIVA. lOi 



THE DESERTED HOUSE. 

Published first in the volume of 1830, and unchanged since. 

The poem is an example of the allegory, — "a figurative discourse in 
which the principal subject is described by another subject resembling 
it in its properties and circumstances ; the principal subject is thus kept 
out of view, and we are left to collect the intentions of the writer or 
speaker by the resemblance of the secondary to the primary subject." 
I'hus in Bunyan's Pil}:^rwi's Progress, the most famous of allegories, the 
Christian life is described under the figure of a journey to the Celestial 
City. In the present poem the death of man is indirectly described. 
Life and Thought have deserted the " house of clay" of which they had 
been tenants. The details of the allegory need no explanation. 

15. Bitildcd. For this old form of the past tense and participle, cf. 
Gen. iv. 17, Josh. xxii. 16, etc. See also Shakespeare, A. and C iii. 2. 
30: "To keep it builded ; Sonn. 124. 5: "No, it was builded far from 
accident," etc. 

z\. A mansion incorruptible. Cf. 2 Cor. v. i. 



DORA. 

This poem, first printed in 1842, and unaltered since, "was partly 
suggested," as a note in the eds. of 1842 and 1843 informs us, "by one 
of Miss Mitford's pastorals." The story alluded to is that of "Dora 
Cresswell " in Onr Village. 

The poem is remarkable for the complete absence of figurative lan- 
guage and every form of " poetic diction " — unless possibly the repeti- 
tion of 

" the reapers reap'd, 
And the sun fell, and all the land was dark " — 

maybe so called. There is certainly nothing else in the piece to which 
any "rhetorical " label can be afiixed. Is there any other English poem 
of the same length that is like it in this respect.? 



GODIVA. 

First published in 1842, and unaltered. 

The old story on which the poem is founded is thus told by Sir Wil- 
liam Dugdale in his Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656: 

"The Countess Godiva, bearing an extraordinary affection to this 
place [Coventry], often and earnestly besought her husband that, for 
the love of God and the Blessed Virgin, he would free it from that 
grievous servitude whereunto it was subject ; but he, rebuking her for 
importuning him in a manner so inconsistent with his profit, commanded 
that she should thenceforward forbear to move therein; yet she, out of 
her womanish pertinacity, continued to solicit him, insomuch that he 



I02 NOTES. 

told her if she would ride on horseback naked from one end of the town 
to the other, in sight of all the people, he would grant her request. 
Whereunto she replied, * But will ye give me leave to do so ? ' And he 
replying ' Yes,' the noble lady, upon an appointed day, got on horseback 
naked, with her hair loose, so that it covered all her body but her legs ; 
and thus performing her journey, she returned with joy to her husband, 
who thereupon granted to the inhabitants a charter of freedom. ... In 
memory whereof the picture of him and his lady was set up in a south 
window of Trinity Church in this city, about Richard II. 's time, his right 
hand holding a charter with these words written thereon : 

E, Eim'dje, far ?Lobc of tfjce 
©oc make ^obcntrg S^ol4rce." 

It is said that the inhabitants all withdrew from the streets and from 
their windows while the lady was passing through the city ; but one man, 
a tailor, could not resist the temptation to look forth. He was struck 
blind at the moment, and to this day the effigy of " Peeping Tom " may 
be seen in the upper part of a house at the corner of Hertford Street 
as a monument of his disgrace. 

The " Procession of Lady Godiva," said to have been instituted to 
commemorate the service she rendered Coventry, has been satisfactorily 
proved to have originated in the reign of Charles II. It was kept up 
annually until 1826, and has been reproduced several times since. In 
its palmy days it was graced by the presence of the civic authorities, 
and was attended with great pomp and display. Lady Godiva was rep- 
resented by a beautiful woman dressed in a closely fitting suit of flesh- 
colored material. She was preceded by the city guards in old armor 
with a band of music, and followed by the mayor, aldermen, and sher- 
iffs, the ancient companies and benefit societies of the city with their in- 
signia and decorations, other bands of music, and various historical 
and mythological characters. 

3. The three tall spires. That of St. Michael's Church, 303 feet high 
(built 1373-1395), that of Trinity Church, 237 feet high (built 1664-1667 
to replace one blown down in 1664), and that of Christ Church, which 
originally belonged to the Grey-friars' Monastery, founded in the 14th 
century. The monastic buildings were destroyed in the time of Henry 
VIII. ; but the beautiful spire escaped and was made part of the present 
edifice built in 1832. 

II. A thoitsa7id sujnmers back. The grim Earl Leofric appears to 
have flourished in the first half of the nth century. The Benedictine 
Priory in Coventry, of which some fragments still remain, is said to have 
been founded by him in 1043. He died in 1057, and both he and his 
lady were buried in a porch of the monastery. 

Poetry, as a rule, cannot adopt an arithmetical precision of statement 
in cases like this ; if it introduces large numbers, they are generally 
round numbers. Byron, describing the Castle of Chillon, says : 
" A thousand feet in depth below 
The massy waters meet and flow; " 

but the actual depth is only about three hundred feet. Even if the poet 



THE DAY-DREAM. 103 

had known the exact measurement, he would not have ventured to 
use it. 

28. As rough as Esau's hand. Cf. Gen. xxvii. 23. 

31. Parted. Departed; as often in Elizabethan English. Cf. Shake- 
speare, Coriola^ms, v 6. 73 : " When I pai'ted hence," etc. For its use 
by modern poets, see Gray, Elegy, i: "the knell of parting day;" 
^o\(\sm\i\\. Deserted Village, 171: "Beside the bed where parting life 
was laid," etc. 

42. Bower. Chamber; as often in our old poetry. Cf. Spenser, F. Q. 
iii. I. 58 : 

" Eftesoones long waxen torches weren light 
Unto their bowres to guyden every guest." 

43. The zuedded eagles. The two halves of the clasp or fastening of 
the belt. 

47. Rippled ringlets. Note the alliteration (see on May Queen, 3, 
above), as in 45 just above and 75 below. 

48. Adown. See on The Mermaid, 15, above. 
53. Clothed on. Cf. 2 Cor. v. 2, 4. 

56. Wide-mouth'' d heads upon the spout. Referring to the gargoyles, or 
grotesquely carved spouts of old Gothic architecture. They are often 
heads of angels, demons, men, and animals, with open mouth, through 
which the water is discharged. The fantastic gables of 61 below are such 
as still abound in the ancient streets of Coventry. 

66. Compact of. Composed of, entirely made up of ; a Shakespearian 
phrase. Cf. Midsufumer N'ighfs Dream, \. i.'&: "of imagination all 
compact : " As You Like It, ii. 7.5: " If he, compact of jars [all made 
up of discords], grow musical," etc. Thankless = ungrateful ; since he 
was one of those who were to be relieved of the tax by the Lady's self- 
sacrifice. 

74. 7yie shameless noon. That had dared to look upon her. 



THE DAY-DREAM. 

The part of this poem entitled The Sleeping Beauty appeared first in 
the volume of 1830 ; the rest was added in 1842. A few verbal altera- 
tions have been made in more recent editions. 

3. Dreaming, etc. The lady's eyelids are prettily personified. 

15. Then take. The early reading was" so take." 

53. The hicndred summers. The hundred years during which, accord- 
ing to the story, the magic sleep is to last. For sumviers, cf. Godiva, 11. 

54. The beams, etc. That is, the sunbeams that shine through the 
oriel window (or bay-window, as we call it) are refracted into many- 
colored rays by the angles of the cut-glass goblets, as in passing through 
a prism. 

79. Purple. The first reading was " purpled." 
81. Tranced. Entranced, enchanted. 

111. Close. Enclosure. Cf. 61-66 above. 

112. On the grass. The early reading was " in the grass." 



I04 NOTES. 

126. The Magic Music. A metaphorical reference to the game so 
called. Cf. The Princess, prol. 190 : 



She remember'd that : 

iked it more 
rest." 



A pleasant game, she thought : she Hl- 
Than magic music, forfeits, all the res 



129. His spirit. Misprinted " The spirit" in the English one-volume 

ed. of 1884; also in Crowell's ed. of 1885. 

149. And last zvith these. The early eds. have " And last of all." 
1^2. Rood. Cross, or crucifix. By the rood and by the holy rood were 

common oaths in the olden time; as 'in Shakespeare, Richard III. iv. 4. 

165: " No, by the holy rood, thou know'st it well," etc. Cf. the name 

of Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. 

157. Pardy. A corruption of the French /^r Z>/tv/ (by God) ; oftener 
written /^;-^ ox perdie. Cf. Hatnlet, iii. 2. 305 : 

" For if the king like not the comedy, 
Why then, belike, — he likes it not, perdy." 

158. Somewhat. The early eds. have "something." 

186. The crescent-bark. The moon, compared to a boat floating on 
the sea of cloud. Cf. Wordsworth, Peter Bell, prol. 3: 

" But through the clouds I Ml never float 
Until I have a little boat, 
For shape just like the crescent -moon." 



LADY CLARE. 

First published in 1842, and suggested, as a note in that ed. tells us, 
by Miss Ferrier's novel, The Inheritance. 

In place of the two opening stanzas the ballad originally had the 
following: 

"Lord Ronald courted Lady Clare, 
I trow they did not part in scorn : 
Lord Ronald, her cousin, courted her. 
And they will wed the morrow morn." 

The change was made in 185 1. 

5. Trow. Believe, think to be true; derived from tnie, like trnth, 
troth, betroth, trnst, etc. 

7. They tzvo. Both the one-volume and the seven-volume English 
eds. of 1884 misprint " They too." 

14. Said, etc. A construction imitated from the old ballads ; like the 
repetition in 21 below, etc 

26. As I live by bread. A common asseveration in the olden time. 
Cf. Shakespeare, As You Like It, ii. 7. 14 : " As I do live by food, I met 
a fool," etc. 

61. The lily-white doe, etc. This stanza was added in 1851. 



THE CAPTAIN— THE BEGGAR MAID. 105 



THE CAPTAIN. 

Published \xs.A Selection from the Works of Alfred Tennyson, brought 
out in 1865. 

31. A clondy gladness lighten'' d, etc. Admirably expressive of the grim 
satisfaction of the men at the prospect of the revenge they had planned. 

35. iVorxaard. The nautical corruption of northward. 



THE BEGGAR MAID. 

This poem, published in 1842, is founded on the old ballad of King 
Cophetiia and the Beggar Maid, which was very popular in its dav and 
is alluded to by Shakespeare in three of his plays. 

In Love'' s Laborer'' s Lost (i. 2. 114) Armado asks Moth, "Is there not a 
ballad, boy, of the King and the I3eggar ? " and the page replies, " The 
world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since, but I 
think now 't is not to be found ; or, if it were, it would neither serve 
for the writing nor the tune." Again in the same play (iv. i. 66), in 
Armado's letter we find the following : "The magnanimous and most 
illustrate King Cophetua set eye upon the pernicious and indubitate 
beggar Zenelophon ; and he it was that might rightly say, Veni, vidi, 
vici ; which to annothanize in the vulgar — O base and obscure vulgar! 
— videlicet. He came, saw, and overcame: he came, one; saw, two; 
overcame, three. Who came ? the king ; why did he come ? to see ; 
why did he see } to overcome ; to whom came he t to the beggar ; what 
saw he ? the beggar ; who overcame he } the beggar. The conclusion 
is victory : on whose side ? the king's. The captive is enriched : on 
whose side } the beggar's. The catastrophe is a nuptial : on whose 
side.'' the king's : no, on both in one, or one in both." 

In Richard II. (v. 3. 80) when the Duchess of York comes to Boling- 
broke to ask mercy for her rebellious son, she says, *' A beggar begs 
that never begg'd before " ; and the king replies : 

" Our scene is alter'd from a serious thing, 
And now chang'd to ' The Beggar and the King.' " 

In Romeo and Juliet (ii. i. 14) Mercutio, in bantering Romeo, re- 
fers to 

"Young Adam Cupid, he that shot so trim. 
When King Cophetua lov'd the beggar maid." 

The old ballad, which may be found in Percy's Reliques of Ancient Eng- 
lish Poetry, begins thus : 

" I read that once in Affrica 

A princely wight did raine, 
Who had to name Cophetua, 

As poets they did faine : 
From nature's lawes he did decline, 
For sure he was not of my mind. 
He cared not for women-kinde. 

But did them all disdaine. 



lo6 NOTES. 

But mark what hapned on a day, 
As he out of his window lay, 
He saw a beggar all in gray, 
The which did cause his paine. 

" The blinded boy, that shootes so trim, 
From heaven down did hie ; 
He drew a dart and shot at him, 
In place where he did lye," etc. 

The king sees the fair beggar, calls her to him, and gives her " his 
chained' 

" For thou, quoth he, shalt be my wife. 

And honoured for my queene ; 
With thee I nieane to lead my life, 

As shortly shall be scene : 
Our wedding shall appointed be, 
And everything in its degree : 
Come on, quoth he, and follow me, 

Thou slialt go shift thee cleane. 
What is thy name, faire maid? quoth he. 
Penelophon,! O king, quoth she : 
With that she made a lowe courtesy, 

A trim one as I weene. 

"And when the wedding day was come, 

The king commanded strait 
The noblemen both all and some 

Upon the queene to wait. 
And she behaved herself that day, 
As if she had never walkt the way ; - 
She had forgot her gowne of gray, 

Which she did weare of late. 
The proverbe old is come to pass, 
The priest, when he begins his masse. 
Forgets that ever clerke he was ; 

He knowth not his estate." . . . 

12. Lovesome. Lovely, lovable; an obsolete word. Cf. Chaucer, 
Troilus and Cresseide, v. : " O lovesome lady dere" ; Otway, Epistle to 
Mr. Duke : " A generous bottle and a lovesome she," etc. In Wiclif's 
Bible, Esther is described as "gracious and loovesum " [Esth. ii. 15). 



THE VOYAGE. 

Printed with Enoch Arden in 1864. Palgrave says : " Life as En- 
ergy, in the great ethical sense of the word, — Life as the pursuit of the 
Ideal, — is figured in this brilliantly-descriptive allegory." 

II. The Lady' s-head. The figure-head of the ship. Cf. Longfellow's 
Building of the Ship : 

' "Zenelophon," in L. L L., appears to be a corruption, unless Shakespeare meant 
it to be a blunder of Armado's. 
■ That is, tramped the streets. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 107 

"And at the bows an image stood, 
By a cunning artist carved in wood, 
With robes of white that far behind 
Seemed to be fluttering in the wind. 
It was not shaped in a classic mould. 
Not like a Nymph or Goddess of old, 
Or Naiad rising frona the water. 
But modelled from the Master's daughter." 

12. Sheer' d. Cleft, divided. Cf. Spenser, F. Q. ii. 6. 5 : 

" Eftsoones her shallow ship away did slide, 
More swift then swallow sheres the liquid skye." 

44. Or sable pine. The smoke rising from Vesuvius in a great erup- 
tion has often been compared to a huge pine-tree seen dark against the 
sky. 

51. The zv hole sea burned. That is with phosphorescent light, which 
is sometimes seen all about the ship, especially in tropical waters, some- 
times only in her wake as she cuts through the myriads of animalculas 
that produce the luminous glow. 

53. At times a carveii craft, etc. Among the islands of Polynesia 
and elsewhere in the Southern Seas, the natives often put forth in their 
canoes to barter fruits, etc., with passing ships. 

57. One fair Vision. " The Ideal " of Palgrave's note quoted above. 

73. One among us. The prosaic man who neither sees nor seeks any 
ideal, and thinks them fools who do. 

87. The whirkuind''s heart of peace. The comparatively calm centre 
of the storm, around which the winds circle. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 

Of this spirited lyric there are three versions. The first appeared 
in the London Examiner, Dec. 9, 1854, and was as follows : 

" Half a league, half a league, 

Half a league onward. 

All in the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 

" Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred, 
For up came an order which 

Some one had blunder'd. 
* Forward, the Light Brigade ! 
Take the guns,' Nolan said : 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 

" ' Forward, the Light Brigade ! 
No man was there dismay'd, 
Not tho' the soldier knew 
Some one had blunder'd : 



lo8 NOTES. 

Theirs not to make reply. 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die, 
Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred. 

"Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon in front of them 

Volley'd and thunder'd ; 
Storm 'd at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well, 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell 
Rode the six hundred 

" Flash'd all their sabres bare, 
Flash'd all at once in air, 
Sabring the gunners there, 
Charging an army, while 

All the world wonder'd : 
Plunged in the battery smoke. 
With many a desperare stroke 
The Russian line they broke ; 
Then they rode back, but not. 

Not the six hundred. 

" Cannon to right of them. 
Cannon to left of them. 
Cannon behind them 

Volley'd and thunder'd; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell. 
While horse and hero fell, 
Those that had fought so well 
Came from the jaws of Death 
Back from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them, 

Left of six hundred. 

" When can their glory fade ? 
O the wild charge they made ! 

All the world wonder'd. 
Honour the charge they made ! 
Honour the Light Brigade, 
Noble six hundred ! " 

This note is prefixed to the poem : " Written after reading the first re- 
port of the Times' correspondent, where only six hundred and seven 
sabres are mentioned as having taken part in the charge." 

The poem was next printed in the Maud volume, in the summer of 
1855, as follows: 

" Half a league, half a league. 

Half a league onward, 
All in the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 
'Charge,' was the captain's cry ; 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs not to make reply. 
Theirs but to do and die, 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred. 



THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. 109 

" Cannon to right of them, 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon behind them 

Volley'd and thnnder'd ; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
Boldly they rode and well ; 
Into the jaws of Death, 
Into the mouth of Hell 

Rode the six hundred. 

" Flash'd all their sabres bare, 
Flash'd all at once in air, 
Sabring the gunners there, 
Charging an army, while 

All the world wonder'd : 
Plunged in the battery smoke, 
Fiercely the line they broke ; 
Strong was the sabre-stroke, 
Making an army reel 

Shaken and sunder'd. 
Then they rode back, but not, 

Not the six hundred. 

"Cannon to right of them. 
Cannon to left of them, 
Cannon behind them 

Volley'd and thunder' d ; 
Storm'd at with shot and shell, 
They that had struck so well 
Rode thro' the jaws of Death, 
Half a league back again, 
Up from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them, 

Left of six hundred. 

" Honour the brave and bold ! 
Long shall the tale be told, 
Yea, when our babes are old — 
How they rode onward." 

The poet was severely criticised for the alterations he had made in 
this version, and a few weeks later the poem was printed in its present 
form on a quarto sheet of four pages, with the following note appended : 

" Having heard that the brave soldiers before Sebastopol, whom I 
am proud to call my countrymen, have a liking for my Ballad on the 
Charge of the Light Brigade, I have ordered a thousand copies of it to 
be printed for them. No writing of mine can add to the glory they 
have acquired in the Crimea; but if what I have heard be true, they 
will not be displeased to receive these copies of the Ballad from me, and 
to know that those who sit at home love and honour them. 

Alfred Tennyson. 
8//^ August, 1855." 

The poem in this revised form, which will be seen to be in the main 
a return to its original draft, was printed in the second edition of the 
Maud volume in 1856. 

The charge which the poet has made more memorable than the his- 
torian could hope to do, took place on the 25th of October, 1854. It 



no NOTES. 

lasted twenty-five minutes, and left more than two thirds of the brigade 
slain or wounded. " As a military manoeuvre it was useless, insane, 
and without a possible result ; as an exploit, it has never been equalled, 
even by those related in the wildest legends of chivalric romance." 

5. Forzuard, etc. Who first gave the order, or whether it was ever 
given by any proper authority, is not known. Captain Nolan, who de- 
livered it, and whose name appears in the first version of the poem, 
was the first man who fell. 

II. iVot tho' the soldier ktiezo, etc. Every one knew that there was 
a blunder somewhere — that the attack was certain to be disastrous — 
but they were ordered to ride "into the jaws of Death," and they did it. 

18. Cannon to right of them, etc. In front were six battalions of in- 
fantry, as many solid masses of cavalry, with thirty heavy guns ; on the 
right were the redoubts with their batteries just taken by the Russians; 
the slopes on the left were lined with riflemen and light field-pieces ; 
and a mile and a half was to be traversed before they could meet the 
enemy. 

33. Right thro' the line they broke, etc. They took the guns, cut 
their way through both infantry and cavalry, and nothing stopped them 
until they reached the banks of the Tchernaya, and wheeled about only 
to see that t4iey were unsupported and surrounded. Still they cut their 
way back, under the deadly fire of the Russian batteries ; and when 
they reached the ground whence they had started, the survivors 
(scarcely a hundred and fifty out of about six hundred and thirty) 
" wheeled round to face the enemy, dressed up as if on parade, and 
burst into a cheer of exultation and defiance." 



THE SAILOR BOY. 

First printed in a collection of pieces by various authors, entitled 
The Victoria Regia, published by Miss Emily Faithfull, Christmas, 
1861. 

12. Scrawl. The word, as the name of any animal, is not to be found 
in the dictionaries ; but according to Palgrave, who may be supposed 
to have consulted the author, it means "some sort of sea-crustacean," 
and is " a modified, or rather an intensified derivative of crawl.''' 

21. Save. Unless, except; still used as a preposition, but obsolete 
as a conjunction. 

THE VICTIM. 

Contributed to Good Words, January, 1868. 

3. Thorpe and byre. Hamlet and cow-house. 

8. Thor and Odin. The latter is the supreme divinity of the North- 
ern or Scandinavian mythology, and is sometimes called Alfadnr (All- 
father). Our Wednesday gets its name from Woden, which is another 
form of Odin. Thor, the thunderer, is the eldest son of Odin and the 
strongest of gods and men. Thursday was named in his honor. 



THE REVENGE. m 



THE REVENGE. 



First published in The Nineteenth Century for March, 1878, with 
the title " Sir Richard Grenville, A Ballad of the Fleet." It was in- 
cluded, under the present title, in the Ballads and other Poems of 1880. 
It is said that when the poet read it to Carlyle the latter exclaimed, 
" Eh ! he has got the grip of it ! " 

Gervase Markham, in The Most Honorable Tragedie of Sir Richard 
Grimiile, Knight (1595), gives the circumstances of the fight thus briefly 
in his " Argument : " 

" Sir Richard Gi-inuile, lying at anchor neere vnto Flores, one of the 
westerlie Hands of the Azores, the last of August in the after noone, had 
intelligence by one Captayne Midleton of the aproch of the Spanish 
Armada, beeing in number fiftie three saile of great ships, and fifteene 
thousand men to man them. Sir Richard, staying to recouer his men 
which were vpon the Hand, and disdayning to flie from his Countries 
enemy, not beeing able to recouer the winde, was instantlie inuironed 
with that hudge Nauie, betweene whom began a dreadfuU fight, con- 
tinuing the space of fifteene howers, in which conflict, Sir Richard sunck 
the great San Phillip of Spaine, the Ascention of ^///^/,_the Admirall of 
the ^Hiilks, and two other great Armados ; about midnight Sir Richard 
receiued a wound through the bodie, and as he was in dressing, was 
shot againe into the head, and his Surgion slaine. Sir Richard mayn- 
tained the fight, till he had not one corne of powder left, nor one whole 
pike, nor fortie Ivuing men ; which seeing, hee would haue sunke his owne 
ship, but that was gaine-stood by the Maister thereof, who contrarie 
to his will came to composition with the Spanyards, and so saued those 
which were left aliue. Sir Richard dyed aboard the Admyrall of 
Spayne, about the fourth day after the battaile, and was mightlie 
bewaild of all men." 

Markham tells in his poem how there came 

" sayling in 
A thought-swift-flying Pynnase." 

Raleigh, in his " Report of the trvth of the fight about the lies of 
A9ores this last Sommer. Betwixt the Reuenge, one of her Maies- 
ties Shippes, and an Armada of the King of Spaine," 1591, says: "In 
the meane while as hee attended those which were nearest him, the 
great San Philip being in the winde of him, and comming towards him, 
becalmed his sailes in such sort, as the shippe could neither w'ay nor 
feele the helme : so huge and high carged was the Spanish ship, being 
of a thousand and five hundreth tuns. Who afterlaid the Reuenge 
aboord . . . But the great San Philip hauing receyued the lower tire 
of the Reuenge, discharged with crossebarshot, shifted hir selfe with 
all diligence from her sides, vtterly misliking hir first entertainment." 

In the account of the hero's death, the poet has followed Jan Huygen 
van Linschoten, in his Disconrs of Voyages, etc., 1598: " All the rest of 
the Captaines and Gentlemen went to visite hym, and to comfort him 



112 NOTES. 

in his hard fortune, vvondring at his courage, and stout hart, for that he 
shewed not any signe of faintnes nor changing of colour. But feeling 
the hower of death to approch, hee spake these wordes in Spanish and 
said: Here die I, Richard Greenfield, with a ioyfull and quiet mind, for 
that I haue ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, yat hath fought 
for his countrey, Queene, religion, and honor, whereby my soule most 
ioyfull departeth out of this bodie, and shall alwaies leaue behinde it an 
euerlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his dutie, 
as he was bound to doe. When he had finished these or such other 
like words, hee gaue vp the ghost, with great and stout courage, and 
no man could perceiue any true signe of heauinesse in him." 

According to Raleigh, the fight began at 3 p. m. on the last day of Au- 
gust, Old Style, or September loth. New Style, in the year 1591. Lins- 
choten, writing in 1596 (translated into English in 1598), puts the arri- 
val of the Armada on the 13th of September ; but Raleigh, writing in 
November, 1591, is more likely to be correct in this respect. 

The battle has been well called "the Ealaklava charge of that Span- 
ish War" and a "naval Thermopylae." Bacon, in his Considerations 
touching a War re with Spai/ie, 1624, says of it : 

"In the yeare 1591, was that Memorable Fight, of an E^iglish Ship 
called the Renenge, vnder the Command of Sir Richard Greennill ; 
Memorable (I say) euen beyond credit, and to the Hight of some He- 
roicall Fable. And though it were a Defeat, yet it exceeded a Victory; 
Being like the Act of Sampson, that killed more Men at his Death, than 
he had done in the time of all his Life. This Ship, for the space of 
15. hours, sate like a Stagge amongst Hounds, at the bay, and was 
seiged, and fought with, in turne, by 15. great Ships of Spaine ; Part of a 
Nauy of 55. Ships in all ; The rest like Abettors looking on a farre off. 
And amongst the 15. Ships that fought, the great Sant Philippo was 
one; A Ship of 1500. tonne; Prince of the \^N^^x& Sea Apostles ; Which 
was right glad, when she was shifted off from the Renenge. This braue 
ship the Renenge, being manned only with 200. (Souldiers and Mariners,) 
whereof 80. lay sicke, yet neuerthelesse after a Fight maintained (as 
was said) of 15. hours and two Ships of the Enemy sunke by her side ; 
Besides many more torne and battred, and great slaughter of Men ; 
neuer came to be entred, but was taken by Composition ; The Enemies 
themselues hauing in admiration the Vertue of the Commander, and 
the whole Tragedy of that Ship." 

21. Thcmbscrew. An instrument of torture in the Inquisition. 

30. Seville. Accented on the first syllable. 

31. Don. That is, Spaniard. 

51. Wo7nb. Belly ; the original meaning of the word. Cf. Wiclif's 
Bible, Luke, xv. 16: " And he coveitide to fille his wombe of the coddis 
that the hoggis eaten," etc. 

66. Grisly. Frightful, ghastly. Cf. Spenser, F. Q. ii. 12. 6: 

" They, passing by, that grisely mouth did see 
Sucking the seas into his entralles deepe. 
That seemd more horrible than hell to be," etc. 

114. Or e7)er. Before ever. This obsolete or, meaning before, is not 



THE DEFENCE OF LUC KNOW. 113 

to be confounded with the conjunction still in use. Cf. Chaucer, 
Knightes Tale, 16S5 : " Cleer was the day, as I have told or this" 
(before this), etc. See also Ps. xc. 2, Prov. viii. 23, Dan. vi. 24, etc. 

118. And the little Revenge, etc. Markham, in a postscript to his 
poem, says : 

" What became of the Peuenge after Sir Richards death, diners re- 
port diuersly, but the most probable and sufficient proofe sayth, that 
within fewe dayes after the Knights death, there arose a great storme 
from the West and North-west, that all the Fleet was disperced, aswell 
the Indian Fleet, which were then come vnto them, as all the rest of 
the Armada, which attended their ariuall ; of which fourteene sayle, 
together with the Reiicnge, and in her two hundred Spanyards, were 
cast away vppon the He of S. Michaels ; so it pleased them to honour 
the buriall of that renowned Ship the Renenge, not suffering her to per- 
rish alone, for the great honour shee atchiued in her life time." 



THE DEFENCE OF LUCKNOW. 

Contributed to The Nitieteenth Century for April, 1879, ^^d 
included in Ballads and Other Poems, 1880. 

The events recorded in the poem occurred during the Sepoy Rebel- 
lion in British India in 1857. " Sir Henry Lawrence took charge of 
Lucknow as Resident in March of that year. The spread of rebellion 
in June confined him to the defence of the city, where he died of 
wounds on July 4. Brigadier Inglis, in succession, then defended 
Lucknow for twelve weeks until it was relieved on September 25 by 
General Havelock, to whom Sir James Outram (who accompanied as 
volunteer) had generously ceded the exploit" (Palgrave). 

20. Brute. Senseless. 

25. Aline? yes, a mine ! *'I am aware," said Sir James Outram, "of 
no parallel to our series of mines in modern war. Twenty-one shafts, 
aggregating two hundred feet in depth, and 3291 feet of gallery have 
been executed. The enemy advanced twenty mines against the palaces 
and outposts ; of these they exploded three which caused us loss of life, 
and two which did no injury; seven have been blown in; and out of 
seven others the enemy have been driven and their galleries taken 
possession of by our miners." 

81. Heat like the mouth of a hell. The terrible heat of the tropical 
summer. 

84. That 2vould not be healed. On account of the climate. 

85. Pitiful-pitiless. An example of oxymoron, ox "the juxtaposition 
of apparantly contradictory notions." Ci. Majid : " Faultily faultless, 
icily regular, splendidly null; " Byron, Childe Harold, ii. 47 : 

" To greet Albania's chief, whose dread command 
Is lawless law ; " 

Id. iv. 16: "Of the o'ermaster'd victor," etc. 

8 



114 NOTES. 

93. Alillions of nmsket-bidlets, etc. It was calculated that during the 
siege the number of shot and other projectiles from the enemy averaged 
one a second. 

97. Pibroch. "A Highland air, suited to the particular passion which 
the musician would either excite or assuage ; generally applied to those 
airs that are played on the bagpipe before the Highlanders when they 
go into battle " (Jamieson). 



THE VOYAGE OF MAELDUNE. 

First published in Ballads and OlJicr Poans, 1880. The original 
story may be found in P. W. Joyce's Old Celtic Romances (London, 
1879). The oldest co])y of it, but imperfect at both beginning and end, 
is in The Book of the Dun Coiv (about the year 1100). A perfect copy 
is in The Yellow Book of Lecan, compiled about 1416. 

In this tale, as translated by Joyce, Maildun {Mail Duin, chief of the 
fort) sets forth in a large curragh (a boat framed of wood and covered 
with hides), with a company of sixty chosen men, to seek the murderer 
of his father. They come, as in the poem, to an island where the man 
lives, but are driven away by a tempest. After three days and nights 
they arrive at " the islancl of the monstrous ants," each " as large as a 
foal ; " but, not liking the " eager and hungry look " of the insects, they 
do not land. After three days more they reach " the terraced island of 
birds," of which they take great numbers, and then sail away to a large 
sandy island from whose shores they are frightened by a monster 
"somewhat like a horse in shape," but with legs like a dog and blue 
claws. On the next island they see a " demon horse-race," and con- 
tinue their voyage to another whereon is a magnificent palace. Here 
they find "abundance of food and ale," but see no inhabitants; so after 
eating and drinking their fill, they thank God and put to sea again. 
The "island of the wonderful apple tree," a single apple from which 
serves to supply the travellers with food and drink for forty days, and 
successive islands infested with " blood-thirsty quadrupeds," strange 
monsters, and " red-hot animals," are visited in turn ; also an island 
where a "little cat," living in a splendid palace, kills one of Maildun's 
brothers ; another island " that dyed black and white " — everything on 
one side of a wall across it becoming black and on the other side white ; 
the "island of the burning river," and that of "the miller of hell" — 
who grinds up all the good things that men complain of, and all that 
they " try to conceal from God;" with the isles of "weeping," of "the 
four precious walls," of "the crystal bridge," of "speaking birds," of 
" the aged hermit," and of " the big blacksmiths," who remind one of 
the Cyclops of old. The voyagers also sail over " the crystal sea," and 
another transparent sea beneath whose waters they see a country beau- 
tiful indeed, but infested with strange and monstrous animals. Later 
they come to another island about which the sea rose up, forming, "as 
it were, a wall all round it;" and to another spanned by a stream of 
water in the form of a rainbow, " and they hooked down from it many 



THE VO YA GE OF MA ELD UNE. 1 1 5 

large salmon." A mighty " silver pillar standing in the sea " and an 
"island standing on one pillar" are other wonders they encounter before 
arriving at a lovely island, the queen of which detains them long by her 
magic arts. Escaping at last, they visit " the isle of intoxicating wine- 
fruits " and that of " the mystic lake," whose waters renewed the youth 
of the bather, and a third where the people were "all continually laugh- 
ing." They pass " the isle of the blest " without venturing to land, and 
soon see a lonely rock whereon a holy hermit dwelt who, after telling 
the wonderful story of his life, said to them : " You shall all reach your 
own country in safety ; and you, Maildun, you shall find in an island 
on your way the very man that slew your father; but you are neither to 
kill him nor take revenge on him in any way. As God has delivered 
you from the many dangers you have passed through, though you were 
very guilty and well deserved death at His hands, so do you forgive 
your enemy the crime he committed against you." Sailing away' the 
voyagers come again to the island where this enemy dwelt. It is even- 
ing and the man is at supper with his friends. Maildun and his com- 
panions stand outside the house and listen to the conversation going 
on within. The people happen to be talking of Maildun, and one asks, 
*' Supposing he came now, what should we do .'' " " I can easily answer 
that," said the man of the house, " Maildun has been for a long time 
suffering great afflictions and hardships ; and if he were to come now, 
though we were enemies once, I should certainly give him a welcome 
and a kind reception." Maildun at once knocked at the door and made 
himself known. The wanderers were invited to enter, and " were joy- 
fully welcomed by the whole household ; new garments were given to 
them ; and they feasted and rested, till they forgot their weariness and 
their hardships." 

It will be seen that while the old Celtic tale has suggested to Tennyson 
a few of the main incidents in the poem, the details are almost entirely 
of his own invention. The date which he assigns to the legend (a. d. 
700) is that which Joyce and others, from internal evidence, accept for 
the events on which it is founded; for they "think it likely that Mail- 
dun did actually go on a voyage, which was afterwards made the frame- 
work round which some ingenious ollave [professional story-teller] wove 
his fanciful story of the hero's adventures." 

6. Liefer. Sooner, rather; the comparative of lief, which, at first = 
dear, beloved, pleasing, came to mean willing; as in Spenser, F. Q. iii. 
9. 13 : •' Or them dislodge, all were they liefe or loth ; " and Id. vi. i. 44 : 
" He up arose, however liefe or loth." From this the transition is 
easy to the adverbial use = willingly, as in /lad as lief = would as 
willingly. Liefer or lever and the superlative liefest are common 
in our early writers. Cf. Chaucer, C. T. 11004: "And he had lever 
talken with a page ;" Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI., iii. i. 164: "my liefest 
liege," etc. 

22. Flitfervwuse-shriek. The cry of the bat, which in England is 
popularly C2\\&(S. flittermotise (fluttering-mouse),y?/V/^<?rwfz^j-^, ox fiude?'- 
mouse. Cf. Ben. Jonson, Sad Shefherd, ii. 8: "And giddy flittermice, 
with leather wings ; " New Inn, iii. I : " Come, I will see this flicker- 
mouse," etc. 



ii6 NOTES. 

26. They almost fell on each other. This idea, which recurs so often 
and so effectively in the poem, is not to be found in the old legend. 
42. Winded. Wound ; as in Scott, Lady of the Lake, i. 500 : 

"A clambering unsuspected road, 
That winded through the tangled screen," etc. 

Winded is often used as the past tense of w/;z^=blow, but less correctly 
(at least in prose) in the case of tvind^XMxvi, twist. 

49. Pollen\l. Covered with pollen. The verb is not in the dictiona- 
ries. Tennyson, like Shakespeare, takes the liberty of turning a noun 
into a verb when it suits his purpose. 

55. The Isle of Fruits. The poet may have got the hint of this island 
from the "isle of intoxicating wine-fruits " in the Celtic tale ; but the 
rich details of the picture are all his own. In the old story the trees 
on the island are "somewhat like hazels, and laden with a kind of fruit 
which the voyagers had not seen before, extremely large and not very 
different in appearance from apples, except that they had a rough berry- 
like rind." Maildun drinks some of the juice of the fruit, which puts 
him into "a sleep of intoxication so deep that he seemed to be in a 
trance" for the next twenty-four hours. When he awakes, he orders 
his people to gather as much of the fruit as they can carry away, and 
they afterwards " fill all their vessels with the juice ; '' but when they 
use the liquor they are careful "to mix a large quantity of water with 
it to moderate its strength." 

61. Bine. "The term bine or bind is applied to the winding or twin- 
ing stem of climbing plants" (Wedgwood); as in hop-bine, woodbine, 
bindweed, etc. 

62. The poisonous pleasure of wine. Cf. Milton, Comus, 47 : " the 
sweet poison of misused wine." 

76. There were some leafd. For the ellipsis of the relative, see on 
The Blackbird, 14, above. 

']']. That undersea isle. The description that follows is developed 
from the simple statement in the old legend that " they could see, be- 
neath the clear water, a beautiful country, with many mansions sur- 
rounded by groves and woods." So far from being tempted to dive 
down to the place, the sight of " an animal fierce and terrible " which 
infests it makes them tremble lest they may " not be able to cross the 
sea over the monster, on account of the extreme thinness of the water; 
but after much difficulty and danger they get across it safely." 

88. The triumphs of Finn. Finn, the son of Cumal, was the most 
renowned of all the heroes of ancient Ireland. He was commander of 
the Feni, or " Feni of Erin," a sort of standing army maintained by the 
monarch for the support of the throne. Each province had its own 
soldiers under a local captain, but all were under one commander-in- 
chief. Finn was equally brave and sagacious. His foresight was, in- 
deed, so extraordinary that the people believed it to be a preternatural 
gift, and a legend was invented to account for it. He was killed at 
a place called Athbrea, on the Boyne, a. d. 284. Ossian, or Oisin, the 
famous hero-poet, to whom the bards attribute many poems still extant, 
was the son of Finn. 



POET'S SONG— IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 1 1 7 

The site of the palace of Finn is still pointed out on the top of the 
Hill of Allen, near Kildare. A tall tower has been erected on the 
spot in our day. 

105. The Isle of the DoJible Towers. If we had not read the old tale, 
we should have said that this quaint and wild conception must have been 
taken from it; but, though it seems so thoroughly like a Celtic fancy, 
there is nothing whatever in the legend that could have suggested it. 

115. Savit Brendan. One of the most famous of the ancient Celtic 
legends is that of "The Voyage of Saint Brendan," undertaken in the 
sixth century. " He set out from near Brandon Mountain in Kerry, 
sailing westwards into the Atlantic Ocean, and, according to the belief 
of some, landed on the shore of America. Pie had many imitators who 
ventured out on the great ocean in their curraghs as pilgrims; but none 
were so enterprising as himself, or met with such a variety of strange 
lands, if we except Maildun and the three sons of O'Corra, whose 
adventures are quite as surprising as Brendan's " (Joyce). 

126. AssoiVd. Absolved. Cf. Spenser, F. Q. i. 10. 52: 

" But first thou must a season fast and pray. 
Till from her bands the spright assoiled is, 
And have her strength recur'd from fraile infirmitis." 



THE POET'S SONG. 

First printed in 1842, and unaltered in more recent eds. It needs 
no explanation or comment. 



IN THE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL. 

Published in the Ballads and Other Poems of tS8o. 

The poem has been criticised as " marred a little by the needlessly 
harsh attack on the practice of modern surgery, as exhibited by one of 
the hospital staff; " but Mr. Palgrave says : " It should be remembered 
that this is a little drama, in which the Hospital Nurse, not the Poet, 
is supposed to be speaking throughout. The two children, whose story 
was published in a Parish Magazine, are the only characters here de- 
scribed from actual life." He adds that "this is the most absolutely 
pathetic poem " known to him. 

10. Oorali. A drug, also knowai as tvoorali and citrari, or enj-ara, ex- 
tracted from the Strychnos toxifera. " It acts by paralyzing the nerves 
of motion, whilst the sensitiveness is left unimpaired" (Palgrave). It 
is used by the South American Indians for poisoning their arrows. 
The reference here is to the practice of vivisection for purposes of 
physiological investigation. Tennyson evidently sympathizes with the 
criticisms, not wholly groundless, which have been urged against it, 
and which have led in England to the enactment of laws restricting 
and regulating it. It cannot be denied that vivisection, like dissection, 
has been of the highest value in settling important practical questions 



ii8 NOTES. 

in medicine and surgery, and it ought not to be absolutely prohibited, 
though it may properly be guarded from abuse. 

37. Spirits in prison. See I Peter, iii. 19. 

42. Do it. That is, perform the surgical operation required. 



LOVE AND DEATH. 

First printed in the volume of 1830, and unaltered, so far as we are 
aware. 

I. What time. A poetical idiom for " at the time when." Cf. Milton, 
Lycidas, 28: " What time the gray fly winds her sultry horn," etc. 

8. Sheeny vans. Shining wings. Cf. Milton, Ode on Death of Fair 
In/ant, 48 : " Of sheeny heaven." Tennyson uses sheeny again in Re- 
coll. 0/ Arabian Nights, 5 : " And many a sheeny summer morn; " and 
also in Madeline, 22 : " Hues of the silken sheeny woof." 

For ^'<;j!«j' = wings, cf. Milton, P. L. ii. 927 : 

" At last his sail-broad vans 
He spreads for flight ; " 

and P. R. iv. 583 : 

" and straight a fiery globe 
Of angels on full sail of wing flew nigh. 
Who on their plumy vans received him," etc. 

See also Dryden, Ovid's Meta^norph. ii. : "He wheel 'd in air, and 
stretch'd his vans in vain." 

13. Eminejtt. Standing above other things ; the etymological sense 
of the word. Like the tree with its shadow, life stands in the light of 
eternity, and death is the shadow it casts. 



INDEX OF WORDS AND PHRASES 
EXPLAINED. 



adown, 97, 103. 
a-dying, 94. 
Alfadur, no. 
allegory, loi. 
alliteration, 98. 
almondine, 97. 
apostrophe, 94, 95. 
as I live by bread, 104. 
as^oiled, 117. 

be (= are), 97. 
before, 95. 
bine, 116. 
black black, 99. 
blackbird, 95. 
black-hearts, 96. 
bower (= chamber), 103. 
Brendan, Saint, 117. 
brute (= senseless), 113. 
builded, loi. 
by the rood, 104. 
byre, no. 

carry me (= marry me), 45. 
chancel-casement, 99. 
Charles's Wain, gg. 
churl (= peasant), 99. 
clothed (;n, 103. 
close (— enclosure), 103. 
compact of, 103. 
crescent-bark, 104. 
cuckoo-flowers, 99. 
curari, 117. 
curragh, 114. 

dagger (figurative), 96. 

death-watch, 100. 

Don {= Spaniard), 112. 

eminent, 118. 
espaliers, 95. 

Finn, 116. 

flittermouse-shriek, 115. 
frozen palms of spring, 96. 



gargoyles, 103. 
ginniting, 96. 
gold dagger (simile), 96. 
grisly, 112. 

had as lief, 115. 
happy stars, 99. 
Holyrood, 104. 

jenneting, g6. 

Lady's-head, 106. 
liefer, 115. 
lovesome, 106. 

magic music (game), 104. 
Maildun, 114. 
marsh-marigold, 99. 
may (noun), gg. 
metaphor, 96. 

Norward, 105. 

oat-grass, 99. 
Odin, no. 
ollave, 115. 
oorali, 117. 
or ever, 112. 
Ossian, 116. 
oxymoron, 113. 

pardy, 104. 

parted (= departed), 103. 

personification, 94, 95. 

pibroch, 114. 

pied, 97. 

pitiful-pitiless, 113. 

pollened, 116. 

prospers (figurative), 96. 

quips, 94. 

roll (of the wind), 100. 
rood (= cross), 104. 
rue (intransitive), 95. 



Saint Brendan, 117. 

sable pine (figurative), 107. 

save (.conjunction), no. 

scrawl (crustacean), no. 

sea-flov\er, 96. 

sea-wolds, 97. 

Seville (accent), 112. 

shameless noon, 103. 

sheeny, 118. 

sheered, 107. 

silver (figurative), 96. 

simile, 96. 

spires, the three tall, 102. 

spirits in prison, 118. 

standards (trees), 95. 

summers (= years), 102, 103. 

sword-grass, 99. 

thankless, 103. 
thorpe, no. 
Thor, no. 
thumbscrew, 112. 
Thursday, no. 
tranced, 103. 
trow, 104. 
turkis, 97. 

unnetted, 96. 

vans (= wings', 118. 

wedded eagles of her belt, 103. 
Wednesday, no. 
what time, 118. 
which (omitted), 96. 
whirlwind's heart of peace, 

107. 
who (omitted), 116. 
vi'ide-mouthed heads upon 

the spout, 103. 
winded ( = wound), 1 16. 
Woden, no. 
wold, 97, 99. 
womb (= belly), 112. 
woorali, 117. 

Zenelophon, 106. 



Rolfe's Students' Series. 



This series of standard English poems is intended 
both for school use and for the private student. It is 
prepared on the same general plan as Mr. Rolfe's well- 
known edition of Shakespeare, and now includes the 
following volumes : — 

I. SCOTT'S THE LADY OF THE LAKE. — An 

account of this book will be found on the following pages ; and the 
hints to teachers there given will apply, with certain obvious modi- 
fications, to the other volumes of the series. 

II. SCOTT'S MARMION. — As Mr. Rolfe explains in his 
Preface, this popular poem has never been correctly printed until now ; 
and, much as it has been read in schools, this is the first thoroughly 
annotated edition that has been published. Scott's own Notes, though 
bulky, are comparatively few in number; and Lockhart's add little to 
them except his interesting transcript of MS. variations from the 
printed text. Mr. Rolfe is the first to supply explanations of many 
allusions which would puzzle young readers, if not their elders also ; 
and he adds much other valuable comment and criticism. 

III. TENNYSON'S THE PRINCESS. — No modern 
poem needs annotation more than this, on account of its numerous 
recondite allusions and the extensive alterations the author has made 
from time to time in the text. Mr. Rolfe clears up all obscurities, 
and records all the textual variations of the successive editions, be- 
sides giving long extracts from the most important reviews and 
criticisms of the poem. 



ROLFE'S STUDENTS' SERIES. 



IV. SELECT POEMS OF TENNYSON. — This volume 
contains seventeen of the Laureate's minor poems (including The 
Lady of Shalott, The Miller's Daughter, CEnone, The Lotos- 
Eaters, The Palace of Art, A Dream of Fair Women, Morte 
d'Arthur, The Talking Oak, Locksley Hall, The Two Voices, 
The Brook, and the Wellington Ode), with copious explanatory 
and critical notes. In the second revised edition (which has been 
augmented by eighteen pages of "Addenda") all the changes made 
in the poems since their first appearance in print are given, with other 
curious information concerning them. The greater part of this matter 
has never been published before, and the earlier forms of the poems 
that appeared in Tennyson's volumes of 1830 and 1832 (1833) are 
almost unknown both in England and in this country, on account of 
the extreme rarity of those editions. Mr, Rolfe could not get access 
to copies while preparing his first edition, but afterwards had the 
opportunity of consulting them in the British Museum. These addi- 
tions to the Select Poems cannot fail to be of exceeding interest to 
every student and critic of Tennyson. 

V. THE YOUNG PEOPLE'S TENNYSON. — This 
volume is made up of poems suited to a younger class of readers 
and students than those for whom the Select Poems is designed. 
It includes, among other pieces : The May Queen, Dora, Godiva, 
The Day-Dream, Lady Clare, The Captain, The Voyage, 
The Revenge, The Defence of Lucknow, The Voyage of 
Maeldune, The Charge of the Light Brigade, In the 
Children's Hospital, etc. The Notes are adapted to the capac- 
ity of young people, but the record of early readings (which is as 
full and complete as in the other Tennyson volumes) and other 
historical matter will be no less interesting to their elders. Very 
little of this illustrative matter has been published in this country, 
and not much of it is to be found in our best libraries. 



ROLFE'S STUDENTS' SERIES. 



VI. BYRON'S CHILDE HAROLD. — This edition of 
Byron's greatest work has been prepared on the same plan as the 
other volumes. The text has been revised with the same care, and 
the notes are equally full. 

The poem is admirably suited for school or college reading. It 
contains elements drawn from varied types of poetry. " Its descrip- 
tions of scenery and sketches of life and manners are idyllic. A lyric 
element is contributed by its outbursts of personal feeling. Its rhetor- 
ical passages, soliloquies, and apostrophes are dramatic. It is also 
an eminently suggestive poem from the numerous subjects — topo- 
graphical, historical, biographical, artistic, and literary — which it 
introduces and places in the most attractive light. Every point that 
is touched on is invested with romance." The descriptions of 
Greece and Italy, of famous works of ancient art and architecture, 
appeal to every student of the classics; and those of other lands 
and nationalities, and of literary and historical characters, have an 
equal interest for every cultivated person, 

Childe Harold \s also "full of noble sentiments, and of enthusiasm 
for what is great and good, while its misanthropy, despondency, and 
scepticism are not of such a nature as to take root in a healthy 
mind. Nor in this poem is libertinism made a subject for jesting, 
or palliated, or depicted in bright colors, nor does a scoffing tone of 
ridicule prevail," as in some other works of Byron. 

Teachers who, either for want of time or for any other reason, do 
not desire to read the entire poem with their classes, will find some 
useful hints as to selections in the Appendix to the Notes. 

Othe?' volumes of the Series are in preparation. 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE 




In a school edition of an Eng- 
lish classic, as I said in the preface 
to the Merchant of Venice thirteen 
years ago, the requisites are "a 
pure text and the notes needed for 
its thorough elucidation and illus- 
tration." 

So far as the text is concerned, 
it might be expected that all an 
editor could have to do, in the 
case of a recent author like Scott, 
would be to follow a ' ' standard " 
edition like Lockhart's ; but, as I 
have explained in m}" preface, a 
careful collation of the best edi- 
tions has proved that no two of them agree exactly in their read- 
ings, and that all of them are more or less corrupt. The errors, 
moreovei", are often of a serious nature, marring or spoiling the 
sense, and otherwise doing the poet gross wrong. It may be fairly 
claimed that in the present edition the text is correct^ printed 
for the first time in half a century at least. If in any case there 
may be a question as to the reading I have adopted, the teacher 
or student can select another from the notes, where all the ' ' various 
readings " are recorded. 

In the Notes, as in my edition of Shakespeare, I have preferred 
to err, if at all, on the side of fulness. Notes should never 
furnish what the student may reasonabl}' be required to find out 



Sir Walter Scott. 



for himself. So long as they give him new work to do, instead of 
doing his work for him, there had better be too many of them than 
too few. The teacher will know how much of the possible labor 
it is expedient to exact. 

Scott's own notes I have generally given in full. A few of the 
longest have been somewhat abridged, mainly in the illustrative 
quotations, some of which are of no special interest except to the 
critic or the antiquarian. That these omitted portions are little 
read, even by critics, is evident from the fact (noted in my 
preface) that the dropping out of a whole page^ through the care- 
lessness of a printer, whereby the halves of two disconnected 
sentences are fused into one unintelligible sentence, has passed 
undetected — or at least uncorrected — in all the reprints of 
Lockhart's edition for fifty years. 

A few suggestions to teachers concerning the use of the Notes 
may not be out of place. I do not assume that the}^ will be 
needed by all teachers, but they ma}' be of service to some. 

In the first place, the notes are not intended to be assigned in 
hulk as lessons. They are to be used for reference as needed, not 
to be committed to memory. The poetry is the lesson, the notes 
are merely aids in studying it. To what extent they are to be 
used will depend upon the method of stud}'. 

Again, some of the notes are simply hints to the teacher, which 
he can follow out at his discretion. I will illustrate my meaning 
by a few examples from the first pages. 

On page 181 (note on 32) I refer to the fact that a figure is 
peculiarly " appropriate," or in keeping with the scene and the 
subject. It would be easy to multiply notes of this kind, but to 
do so would defeat my purpose. I do not believe in " sign-post" 
criticism of this kind. The teacher should see that his pupils 
find similar instances for themselves, giving them help only in a 
Socratic way, and no further than may be necessary to train them 
to the exercise of their own taste and judgment. 



On page 182, the notes on 38 and 54, calling attention to the 
rhetorical force of inversions (the teacher should read Herbert 
Spencer's essa}^ on " The Philosophy of Style," if he is not ah-eady 
familiar with it), those on 46 and 80, referring to words not 
admissible in prose, and those on 66 and G9, pointing out poetical 
or metaphorical uses of words, illustrate classes of comments 
which the pupil may be led to make for himself to whatever extent 
the teacher pleases. 

If the pupil has not learned the elementary facts about figurative 
language, let him learn them, not from a school text-book of 
" rhetoric," hut fro?n the poem, and by finding and analyzing them 
for himself, rather than by having them pointed out and explained to 
him ; and the same may be said of the " properties of style," and 
of " rhetoric " in general, so far as it has to do with poetry. In my 
own experience, I have found this the most satisfactory, if not 
the only really satisfactory, way of teaching these things to young 
students. The average schoolboy or schoolgirl can be led, by 
judicious questioning, to deduce all this "rhetoric" from the first 
two or three pages of the Ladi/ of the Lake in a few hours. Almost 
no direct instruction is needed. The technical terms of the text- 
book should be very sparingly introduced. Only such as have ceased 
to be exclusively technical, and ought to be understood by every 
well-informed person {metaphor, simile, personification, and the 
like) should be employed. The mere pointing out of instances of 
the figures (saying " This is a metaphor," or "That is a simile," 
etc.), without regard to the aptness, or beauty, or other note- 
worthy fact concerning them, is "flat, stale, and unprofitable" 
work, after the pupil has once learned to recognize and name the 
figures. In some schools this is the chief thing done in the so- 
called " study " of poetry, but it is about as useless as " parsing," 
than which no exercise can be more useless. 

I might go on with illustrations of what would be my own way 
of using notes and following out their suofffestions, but these 



will suffice to give the teacher an inkling of the method. Of course 
the material furnished can be used in man}' other ways, and the 
teacher may have one of his own that is better — at least for 
Idni — than mine would be. 

Notes on points of grammar and on the derivation of words I have 
avoided, except where they bear upon the interpretation of the 
passage. 

The quotations from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, illus- 
trating Scott's free use of Elizabethan words and constructions, 
will interest the general reader and the teacher; but the latter 
must decide for himself how far he will make use of them in school 
work. In my own experience I have found that the majority of 
pupils old enough to read a poem like this soon become interested 
in the glimpses of the history of their vernacular, which they get 
from the poet's archaic phraseolog}^, and such " parallelisms " as I 
cite in m}^ notes. 

To the ynetre of the poem I have devoted but few notes, and 
personally I should not give much time to the subject in school. 
The most that I should attempt would be to make the pupil under- 
stand the regular form of the measure (iambic, trochaic, or what- 
ever it may be, laying no stress on the names except for the fact 
that some of them are terms which every intelligent person should 
understand), and some of the musical variations from the regular 
form (see page 182, note on 72) ; and this mainly to show that 
metre is not the monotonous up-and-down singsong that young 
people are apt to imagine. 

I may add that the teacher can use the MS. readings, and the 
misreadings of the common editions, as exercises for the taste and 
critical judgment of his pupils. They should be able to see, and 
to make others see, why one reading is better or worse than 
another. It would be a dull boy or girl that could not see, for 
instance, that clift in i. 217 must be right, and cl'ff wrong ; or 



that heart for heat in ii. 685 is nonsense, though the corruptions 
have passed unchallenged for half a century or more. 

My edition of Shakespeare, of which I at first expected to 
prepare only five or six plays for school use, has been completed 
because it proved to be acceptable to readers in general ; and an 
edition of any poet, which is really adapted to the man}^ and varied 
demands of the school-room, should, it seems to me, be equallj' 
suited to the wants of the great majorit}' of readers, — all, indeed, 
except the most critical and exacting. 

For the home study of the poem — a kind of social enjoyment 
that ought to be more common — some of the hints given above 
will be no less sus'sestive than for school work. 



W. J. R. 




INCHMAHONE ISLAND, LAKE MENTEITH. 



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